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The Telstra Group Ltd (ASX: TLS) share price is up more than 1% as Optus faces a national outage of its network. The S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) is flat, so it’s a solid start to the day for the ASX telco share.
Investors may be betting that Telstra can benefit in the longer term from this outage.
What’s going on with Optus?
According to reporting by various media outlets, including the ABC, an Optus outage has left millions of Australians without mobile and internet services.
An outage first occurred at about 4 am, with customers not able to make or receive calls, with mobile internet services also impacted.
Optus said:
Optus is aware of an issue that may be impacting some of our mobile and internet customers. We are currently working to identify the cause and apologise for any inconvenience. In case of an emergency customers can still call triple zero.
The ABC also reported that Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said initial advice from Optus was that it was due to problems deep within the network:
It does sound like it is a significant part of what we call the core network – so basically the brains of the network have been impacted here.
At this stage, the Department of Home Affairs has not seen any evidence it is a cyber attack.
A number of entities are affected by this, including hospitals and trains in Melbourne as well as the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX: CBA).
Telstra shares to benefit?
Telstra is the biggest telecommunications business in Australia and I’m sure would like to say that the Telstra network is more reliable than the Optus one.
The telco may be able to benefit if it wins customers who change providers as a result of today’s loss of connection.
It’s not just individuals affected by this – large entities are being impacted. If Telstra is able to pick up some of these enterprises then it could be a material boost to the corporate-focused side of the business.
Telstra is investing heavily in its 5G network to have the best offering and today’s Optus pain could be Telstra’s gain.
Telstra share price snapshot
Since the start of 2023, the telco’s shares are almost flat, as we can see on the chart.