“NBN Co has been designated the statutory infrastructure provider and is required to offer fixed line connections to all households, [and] Telstra is the universal service provider, with obligations to supply voice services to all households,” Optus’ submission said.
“Telstra receives around $230 million each year to compensate for these obligations, $100 million from government and the rest from the telecommunications industry.”
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin faces a grilling over her response to the outage. Natalie Boog
Optus tried to show its outage was far from unique among telcos, providing a detailed list of previous failings, including multiple outages at Telstra in 2016, including one that knocked out services for up to 12 hours, and 000 call disruptions in 2018.
Optus’ offer of 200 gigabytes of data for some affected customers was labelled “tokenistic” by Greens Senator Hanson Young, but Optus said this was more generous than what had been offered by its rivals after outages, and that compensating for a day of lost service would give customers an insultingly low amount of between $1 and $2.
“We understand there are calls by some for Optus to go further, including providing compensation for consequential impacts for business customers.
“However, there is no precedent for compensation being paid by telecommunications providers to all business customers who suffer a loss of business as a result of an outage,” Optus’ statement said.
“For example, NBN Co’s terms with telecommunications providers such as Optus make it clear that there is no compensation for business interruption; liability is limited to a refund of fees for the period of any outage.
“Similarly, there is no precedent for essential services such as electricity providers to pay compensation for business losses when there is an outage.”
Optus warns that imposing a refund would create a new precedent that would extend far beyond Optus and apply to all other telecommunications providers, as well as other providers of essential services, critical infrastructure and public services.
“This makes it a much broader policy question for government that would have far-reaching implications across many sectors of the economy and the cost of these services for Australian consumers,” Optus wrote.
Optus also defended its communication during the outage, documenting numerous appearances during the day by Ms Bayer Rosmarin on radio and interviews with publications including the Financial Review.
In defence of the suggestion that it has underinvested in its networks, Optus said it invested about $1.5 billion annually, approximately 20 per cent of its revenue.
“This puts Optus at the high-end of the range when it comes to international benchmarks for network investment,” the telco said.