Telstra says they have picked up aggrieved customers, says Telstra CEO

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland and Emergency Management Minister Murray Watt and their departments have begun developing such emergency roaming capabilities, work that was already underway before last week’s outage.

But that was a very different proposition to network-sharing in the event of an outage, according to Seneviratne.

“Last week we lost one of the national networks, roughly one third of our carriers. We don’t design our networks to have overhead to manage another carrier’s whole customer base, it just doesn’t work that way.

“I’m sure it’s going to be the topic of conversations with some of the parliamentary enquiries, and we’ll be happy to participate and cooperate with that. But it’s a very different proposition, emergency roaming in a selected area, versus opening up the possibility of having 11 million Optus customers suddenly come into our network. You probably end up having two national outages.”

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Telstra executives carry SIM cards of other carriers with them in the event of a Telstra outage, he added. Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin last week raised eyebrows when she was forced to dial in to ABC radio via WhatsApp, given Optus’ networks were down.

Telstra on Tuesday confirmed its financial forecasts for the financial year ending June 30, including earnings of between $8.2 billion and $8.4 billion, and announced five new routes for its intercity fibre project.

Telstra shares dipped slightly, trading down 1.4 per cent at $3.90 as of 2pm AEDT.

Optus late on Monday revealed a routine software upgrade by a third-party infrastructure provider was behind last Wednesday’s outage that hit consumers, businesses, hospitals and rail networks across the country. Bayer Rosmarin will face a two-hour Senate grilling on Friday, as well as other probes from the communications watchdog and Rowland over the incident.

Meanwhile, retail mogul Gerry Harvey went in to bat for Optus, labelling calls for Bayer Rosmarin to resign following the network meltdown as “unfair” and “ridiculous”.

Harvey said he felt it necessary to defend Optus “because I thought that the overwhelming response from the media and the politicians was way over the top”.

“I think it’d be a tragedy for someone to be sacked because of this,” he told Perth radio station 6PR. “I’d be very disappointed in the Singaporean [parent] company if they did that. I suspect they won’t, I hope they won’t. If the person is incompetent, sure, that’s a different thing altogether.

“The CEO doesn’t run the IT department. You employ people that run that. And somewhere something goes wrong. It might be that person’s fault in the IT department, it might not be. It might be a hack. It might be just bad luck.”