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.

    •  WaterWaiver   ( @WaterWaiver@aussie.zone ) English
      12•8 months ago

      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.