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New Federal Inquiry Into Optus Crash Will Make Heads Roll At Problem Carrier

The impact of the Optus network crash, which damaged business revenues and disrupted the lives of millions, is set to be reviewed by the Federal Government, who yesterday revealed the terms of reference for an inquiry that could lead to further management resignations at the Singtel owned carrier.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has appointed telecommunications veteran Richard Bean to lead the review, including an investigation of why triple-zero calls failed during the outage and whether the current system is fit for purpose.

Businesses impacted by the crash including hundreds that had to close down for the day, will be given the opportunity to explain the impact of the crash on their business, among them are hundreds of retailers who had no broadband for their digital transaction systems.

The losses are in the tens of millions, which contributed to Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigning from her position after questions were raised at a recent Senate hearing into the crash.

Richard Bean, the former deputy chair of independent communications watchdogs the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), will lead the review, running concurrently to probes from a Senate committee chaired by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young and the ACMA.

“The recent Optus outage caused significant disruption to the lives of millions of Australians, impacted small businesses, and left many without the ability to contact emergency services,” Rowland said yesterday.
“We need to learn the lessons from this serious incident because no network is immune from technical faults or outages.”

Questions have also been raised about Optus’s offer of 200 gigabytes of free data as compensation for its network outage.

Several people have described the offer as a “joke”.

Nine Media reports that a similar outage suffered by Canadian telco Rogers last year led to new laws requiring all telecommunications providers to provide mutual assistance to one another in the event of an outage, including emergency roaming services for rivals’ affected customers. It also spurred new requirements for telcos on how to communicate to the public during an outage.

At the time of its mass outage, Rogers’ chief technology officer was Jorge Fernandes, who currently serves as chief technology officer for Optus’ parent company Singtel.



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