Optus is investigating the cause of Wednesday’s nationwide outage.
Experts say telcos have been cost cutting, and have not properly safeguarded systems
They say the government should legislate redundancies in major telco systems
[Industry expert Mark] Gregory said Optus and Telstra have likely concluded that building highly advanced safeguards to their infrastructure and software is too expensive and have been allowed by the government to prioritise profit over the reliability of the service.
This is a bit of an interesting point: A significant proportion of Australians - something in the pallpark of 40% of us rely on Optus every day. This makes Optus a fairly essential pillar of infrastructure in Australia. Yet, they’re a private company and can do pretty-much whatever they like.
When you stop to think about it, a few private companies really impact us. Imagine if Coles and Wollies were to not be available for a while. Twelve hours wouldn’t impact us much, but a week? We would have serious societal problems.
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Give them the option. They can either build out the capacity to support each others customers when their network fails, or they have to double their core network infra and admin costs with internal redundancies… If private enterprises can’t be trusted to provide critical services, they should be nationalised.
Salvo@aussie.zone 1 year ago
That is like in the 1990s when cable was being rolled out. OptusVision was being (literally) rolled out in established neighbourhoods which were already serviced by the BigPong Cabal.
Meanwhile, newer suburbs had nothing except twisted copper ADSL2 until the NBN (and their competing Fibre Networks) started getting rolled out in the late 2010s.