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.
Give them the option; they can either build out the capacity to support each others customers when their network fails, or they have to double their core network infra and admin costs with internal redundancies… If private enterprises can’t be trusted to provide critical infrastructure and services, they don’t deserve to own, operate, or profit from them, and should be nationalised.
That is like in the 1990s when cable was being rolled out. OptusVision was being (literally) rolled out in established neighbourhoods which were already serviced by the BigPong Cabal.
Meanwhile, newer suburbs had nothing except twisted copper ADSL2 until the NBN (and their competing Fibre Networks) started getting rolled out in the late 2010s.
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.
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.
NBN should take over wireless networks. Telstra starts at $62 - which is far too much especially since everyone has wifi most of the day, and nobody else offers reliable service.
I would hazard that if you’re going to move something to monopoly control: don’t make it for-profit like the NBN is run. Make it a proper government service.
(The NBN’s debt has to be paid off by the NBN, so they have to try and keep finding ways of paying it off. As opposed to just making it normal government debt and running the service as best as you can for the people)
EDIT: to quote the article itself:
Mr 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.
^ I’d be worried that putting it in the (existing) NBN’s hands wouldn’t necessarily address that.
A few dinner with government officials later, the findings would be that Optus is underfunded and should be granted with some public money for improvement. COE get a raise. Everybody is happy /s
Seriously, this can really happen, just look at qantas
but how would they afford to give 200gb “free” data that almost noone will use again?
that was a slap in the face
I think re-nationalising telecommunications (land line, mobile and nbn) is looking pretty attractive. Critical national infrastructure that serves the whole population should never be privatised and run with capitalist objectives.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Telecommunications experts have warned Australia’s largest mobile providers are vulnerable to another major outage due to gradual cost-cutting and a critical lack of regulation.
Optus is soon to be the subject of a government review, a Senate inquiry and a probe by the Australian Communications and Media Authority after its network collapsed and stayed down for more than nine hours.
Mr 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.
Telecommunications expert Paul Budde said he anticipated issues would arise when Australia’s carriers moved to a more deregulated environment.
“It’s not just another company like a chocolate factory, no, this is integral to our society, to our economy and that was not recognised when Telstra was privatised and that situation has continued until now.”
“We’re continually taking proactive steps to manage our network resilience with our teams around the country working at it every day,” they said.
The original article contains 656 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
