Inquiry into national Telstra outage provides no reassurance similar failures won’t happen again

Peak communications consumer body ACCAN says that there has been no reassurance provided today that the national outage that led to nationwide chaos and disruption in Australian communities will not happen again.

Following last week’s nationally disruptive mobile outage, a senate hearing has heard a failure to properly document system changes, updates and replacement of aged equipment were key drivers in the massive Telstra outage.

The inquiry heard Telstra was warned by the manufacturer of a critical time synchronisation unit that a software update was needed to keep the unit fully functioning – a warning the telco did not act on before last week’s nationwide outage cut Australians off from calls, payments and Triple Zero. A Telstra executive confirmed that, if the update was initiated, this outage could have been avoided.

ACCAN CEO Carol Bennett said that this latest incident underlines the fact that Australia still has no enforceable reliability standards holding telcos to account – contributing to these risks being left unmanaged.

“If telcos cannot provide reliable services – and given their track record, last week’s outage and emerging evidence from new outage registers, that now seems to be the reality – we need to strongly consider what requirements government can put in place to force telcos to lift their network performance. We shouldn’t all have to carry multiple sim cards in case a network fails.”

“Over recent weeks we have heard from telcos about the complexity of their networks. Complexity is neither an adequate excuse for failures to invest and manage known risks, nor a compelling case for less regulation. It is a reason for stronger, enforceable rules.”

ACCAN has consistently called for telecommunications to be regulated in a manner befitting an essential service and for domestic roaming to be on the national agenda.

“Energy providers are required to meet targets for the duration and frequency of outages. This drives reliability via a strong disincentive for failure. This is the ‘stick’ which the government must consider applying to the telecommunications sector.”

“Our consumer research has demonstrated overwhelming support for reliability standards being applied to this sector.”

“Telstra today said that they are committed to providing a reliable service. If that’s genuinely the case, they should have no objection to being held to enforceable reliability standards – the same way energy providers are held to account for network reliability.

ACCAN is calling on government to use the insights from this inquiry to introduce clear reliability standards and investigate implementation of domestic mobile roaming, rather than continuing to rely on industry best-efforts that have failed Australians repeatedly.

Every outage is more than a technical failure – it is Australians potentially locked out of emergency help, work, banking, government services, social connection and communication with loved ones.

Far from saying that this will never happen again, Telstra today have flagged that in fact, it will. This is simply not good enough and Australians deserve better.

This press release has also been published on VRITIMES