CommsDay Comment Piece: Should Telstra's Network Outage Trigger New Regulation?

Last Friday’s Senate Committee hearing was the latest expression of political indignation at Telstra’s recent network outage.

Of course this outage inconvenienced millions of Australians. 

At Telstra it has triggered much self examination - just as happened at Optus and at TPG Vodafone after similar events in recent years.

The telecommunications industry has a very strong culture of keeping the network up and keeping users connected.  Telco people feel it almost as a moral imperative; they hate it when they have a network outage.

Regrettably, from time to time, outages happen.  That has always been the case - but a network outage today has a much bigger impact than even ten years ago.

In the modern world, our telecommunications networks are the platforms on which much of our economy and society operates.  

Almost every Australian has a smartphone; many of us check it 20 or 50 or 200 times a day. 

Which perhaps helps explain the strong criticism levelled at Telstra - from politicians, journalists and many others.

Some of the criticism misunderstands what happened.  It was not a failure of the triple zero system.  Emergency calls from Optus and TPG Vodafone customers kept working.

The ‘camp on’ feature of triple zero - allowing an emergency call from a Telstra mobile to be made successfully over the Optus or Vodafone network - reportedly worked as it is designed to do, according to Telstra. 

As Telstra has made clear, its network outage occurred because a device which synchronises time across the network failed.  

While Telstra got on with identifying and fixing the problem, plenty of other people were suggesting the imposition of big fines, or calling for further regulatory changes to the Triple Zero arrangements - even though it was only last year that new legislation was passed to establish the ‘Triple Zero Custodian.’

I think we need to tread carefully. Certainly there must be a careful examination of what happened, so that the chances of recurrence can be minimised.  

But is that best achieved by fundamental change to our telecommunications policy and regulatory framework, as some are calling for? 

Should there be even more detailed performance requirements for mobile and fixed services generally, and for the triple zero system?

Should government be much more closely involved in day to day operational decisions at the telcos?  

The calls for more regulation and more government intervention in my view misdiagnose the issue - and risk making things worse not better. 

They presume, wrongly, that the telcos have an incentive to provide poor service and the only way to fix that is regulation. In fact, the telcos have a very strong commercial incentive to keep their network uptime at the highest possible level.

Is it really plausible that subjecting the telcos to more detailed day to day regulatory oversight would reduce the risk of network outages?  Do the regulators know more about how to design and maintain and operate networks than the skilled network engineers and other telecommunications professionals who work in our telcos?

Australia already has an extensive and detailed telecoms policy and regulatory framework. Its aim is to get the best possible network coverage, both fixed and mobile, with the lowest possible network downtime, the widest possible geographic coverage, and all delivered at the lowest possible cost, to as many Australians as possible.

At the centre of this framework is the encouragement of competition in telecommunications.  This goes back to policy decisions made by the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments, which recognised that massive investment would be needed to modernise our telecommunications networks and deliver better services.  

Wise decisions by both sides of politics opened up the sector to commercial investment and abolished the old government monopoly.

It seems hard to imagine now, but in the monopoly days, new customers routinely had to wait for six weeks to get the phone connected.  How much the old Telecom Australia could spend on upgrading the network each year depended on the government’s overall budget position.

By contrast, today we take for granted the near ubiquitous and continuous availability of high standard voice and data services almost anywhere in built up parts of Australia.  

That has only happened because the telcos have collectively invested tens of billions of dollars to upgrade their networks from GSM (or 2G) to 3G, 4G and now 5G.  That means we now have much higher quality services: even a few years ago today’s commonplace sight of train carriages full of morning commuters watching videos on their phones would have been unimaginable. 

Competition has proved to be a powerful motivator: each of Tesltra, Optus and Vodafone keeps investing because it fears losing customers to the others if its offering is inferior.

The telcos’ investment - supplemented by government programs like mobile black spots - also means today’s mobile networks cover much larger geographic footprints than twenty years ago. 

Better coverage makes it more likely that if we are in an accident, we are within range and can make a successful 000 call to get help quickly. 

And our 000 system has steadily improved - for example with the introduction in 2020 of ‘advanced mobile location’ technology, so that when you make an emergency call from a mobile device, your location, within a few metres, goes automatically to the emergency services.  

We should keep this recent network outage in perspective.  Whether we like it or not, networks will very occasionally have failures. Threatening fines will not change that fundamental reality.

Providing reliable fixed and mobile services across our massive and thinly populated continent is a complex, massive and hugely expensive undertaking. 

Our telcos are not perfect. Sometimes they get it wrong as Telstra did on this occasion.

But let’s recognise how much they get right.  And let’s be careful not to respond in ways that will make it harder, not easier, to deliver reliable, high quality telecommunications services.