Telecommunications experts warn Australia’s major mobile providers are vulnerable to another major outage due to gradual cost-cutting and a critical lack of regulation.

  • Optus is investigating the cause of Wednesday’s nationwide outage.

  • Experts say telcos have been cost cutting, and have not properly safeguarded systems

  • They say the government should legislate redundancies in major telco systems

[Industry expert Mark] Gregory said Optus and Telstra have likely concluded that building highly advanced safeguards to their infrastructure and software is too expensive and have been allowed by the government to prioritise profit over the reliability of the service.

  • NathA
    10·
    1 year ago

    This is a bit of an interesting point: A significant proportion of Australians - something in the pallpark of 40% of us rely on Optus every day. This makes Optus a fairly essential pillar of infrastructure in Australia. Yet, they’re a private company and can do pretty-much whatever they like.

    When you stop to think about it, a few private companies really impact us. Imagine if Coles and Wollies were to not be available for a while. Twelve hours wouldn’t impact us much, but a week? We would have serious societal problems.

    • SalvoEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      We would be forced to buy from Aldi, IGA or Foodworks.

      We would also probably realise how much the Duopoly has been bending us over and Coles and Woolies would start haemorrhaging customers.

      I honestly don’t know why anyone uses BigPond or OptusNet for NBN internet. Every single other independent ISP provides better quality of service, better pricing and better technical support.

      Although Mobile Coverage is another story. Belong and Amaysim customers don’t get network priority over Telstra and Optus’ customers.