Stefan Mileschin

One of Australia's largest mobile networks was caught by the billabongs in a freak rogue beer fridge accident.

The fridge in north-east Victoria was hunted down by a software "robot" employed by Telstra to identify things that interfere with its mobile network.

According to the Herald Sun, the "rogue beer fridge" had been traced to a Wangaratta man's garage.

It had been interrupting mobile signals in "several neighbourhoods" of the town of 17,000, which lies about 230km from Melbourne.

It is not clear why a beer fridge would have it in for the internet. It might have been working for the resistance or trying to link other beer fridges across Australia in a great electronic beer revolt. Or it could just have been broken.

Telstra's area team manager for mobile coverage delivery in the Victorian metropolitan, Richard Henderson, told iTnews it is "one example of hundreds and hundreds of investigative interference jobs that are done each year across the country".

He did not say how many of them were beer fridges. In fact he went as far to say that there was no particular focus now on beer fridges, but they always say that.

Over the past 18 months, Telstra has been fine-tuning a "software robot" developed out of its Operations division to help track down sources of network interference.

It is basically an algorithm that crawls a database of performance stats collected from equipment across the NextG mobile network. We guess its job is a lot easier if it is programmed to look for beer.

http://news.techeye.net/mobile/beer-...mobile-network