“We do not have visibility of Optus customer experiences related to their ability to place successful triple zero calls. However, we did answer some emergency calls from Optus customers during the outage.”
The most contentious issue for Australia’s telcos stemming from the outage has been pressure to enable a new regime of roaming, which would mean customer services spill on to rival networks if their provider goes dark.
Telstra has undertaken a trial to show that this is possible in times of natural disasters such as floods or bushfires. However, its submission backed up claims made by outgoing Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin last week that it would be unfeasible to expect telcos to start sharing each other’s networks during outages.
Risk to other networks
“This is because roaming, even temporarily, requires authentication of the end user by their mobile network operator and ultimately the routing of their traffic back to the core network,” Telstra wrote.
“Even if a TDR (temporary disaster roaming) capability, as currently being considered, had been available on 8 November, it would not have been able to provide service to Optus’ customers, as all communications with the Optus core network were disrupted.”
Telstra said there was a “high risk” that the sudden increase in new connections and traffic from roaming end users would overwhelm the host network, and leave Australia with two major networks down.
To get around these problems would require extensive and costly work, whereby every telco’s subscriber records would need to be loaded into every network provider’s systems. This would necessitate a new national register of customer subscription records, technical fixes around network incompatibilities, pose security concerns around sharing SIM card encryption keys and proprietary subscription records.
“We are not aware of any other country doing this yet,” Telstra wrote.
Telstra and Optus-rival TPG, however, took a different view, saying the government should invest more to help telcos offer emergency roaming, and consider mandating domestic roaming.
This would be a more appealing commercial proposition for TPG, which has limited infrastructure in regional Australia. The competition regulator knocked back a planned infrastructure sharing deal between Telstra and TPG.
“Mandated domestic roaming should be considered as a practical option to bring greater choice and connectivity to regional Australia,” TPG argued in its submission.
“This would also create incentives for increased investment in regional areas and reverse the trend of weakened competitive dynamics. A permanent roaming solution would also have the benefit of providing a much higher degree of network resilience for Australians living in regional areas.”