Optus has offered 200 gigabytes of free data to users after 10.2 million Australians were left without phone or broadband connections on Wednesday.
Tech expert Trevor Long said the nature of modern phone usage rendered the offer meaningless.
“If only data had that kind of value. It doesn’t,” he said.
“The average mobile user in Australia uses 15 gigabytes (of data).”
Long also accused Optus of “overlooking” a lot of small businesses, as well as the impact of broadband loss and wi-fi loss for people working from home.
“They have essentially overlooked the businesses that aren’t big enough to be on their business radar,” he said.
“What they’ve said if you have an Optus business manager give them a call.
“Most local cafes don’t have an Optus business manager, they just happen to have an Optus SIM card.”
The federal government yesterday announced a review into the network collapse.
Long suggested Optus could do better for its customers by putting credit on their mobile accounts and urging businesses to keep receipts for the period as the industry ombudsman and regulators embark on examining the issue of compensation.
It’s been revealed the outage was caused by a routing issue on the Optus network.
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”The number one thing all the other telcos are doing is learning how not to react if they have these issues,” Long said.
“We will have these issues again, folks. The government can’t change the fact that technology fails.
“We can treat our customers better and communicate better with everyone who’s affected.”
