From CommsDay of 4 June 2026
Earlier this week the CommsDay Summit was held in Sydney, and the many and varied contributions from industry stakeholders have been reported in CommsDay issues since then. There is a lot to choose from, including many that expand on issues that have already been the subject of Stories of the Week. In the end we have chosen the Special Report in yesterday’s CommsDay of the Panel Discussion at the Summit (held on Wednesday) in which the panellists discussed the need for a national telecommunications vision, something that TelSoc has been supporting since its Broadband Futures initiative in 2021. The panellists covered a lot of topics and provided some very useful insights which makes reading this (relatively) long article worthwhile.
SPECIAL REPORT
Panel calls for national telco vision and root-and-branch regulatory review
Australia needs a national telecommunications vision rather than a piecemeal approach to policy across networks, AI, data centres and energy, a CommsDay Summit panel has heard.
Long Street Advisors CEO Mohammad Chowdhury said Australia was an advanced economy that was embracing AI and welcoming data centre investment, but lacked an integrated view of what its telecommunications sector should become.
“We are an advanced economy, we are embracing AI, we are welcoming data centre investment. There are lots of things happening, but I find it is all very piecemeal and just looking three months ahead,” Chowdhury told the Summit’s closing great debate.
“I do not believe there is a proper vision and I do not believe the government has taken the opportunity to figure out what that vision actually is,” he said.
Chowdhury said Australia compared unfavourably with other major economies that had developed clearer long-term strategies
for telecommunications and digital infrastructure.
“I feel as though Australia as an OECD economy sorely lacks this. Other countries have this: Singapore, the US, the European Union, China and others. I think that is really missing from this country’s fabric,” he said.
THE FULL STACK: His comments were backed by NEXTDC head of colocation Chris Losco, who said government needed to stop viewing policy through separate horizontal categories and instead consider the entire technology stack.
Losco said there were currently telco regulations, data centre regulations and energy regulations, but the growth of AI meant those frameworks could no longer be treated as separate policy domains.
“They need to look at it vertically, at the entire stack, all the way from AI and software through to energy, and look at it differently,” he said.
Losco said geography was already set, but policy was not. He said the question was how government could foster an environment in which the AI, data centre, energy and communications ecosystem could develop over time.
He also urged the communications minister to engage directly with the energy minister on the need to accelerate investment in transmission networks, saying additional power capacity would be critical to meeting AI and data centre demand.
ROOT-AND-BRANCH REVIEW: The panel’s policy comments came as Internet Association of Australia CEO Narelle Clark called for a “constructive, sensible, consolidated root-and-branch review of the telco sector and regulation.”
Asked what she would tell the communications minister if given one minute, Clark said: “Frankly, I would just like the minister to talk to us.”
Clark said she did not expect any government to take on serious policy reform easily, given the current political environment. “I am not expecting, given the way things have happened over the last few years and the fact that we are in a peak disgruntlement, any government of any flavour to take on serious policy reform. It is just too hard. It is too easy to tear it down and too easy to tear it apart,” she said.
But she said the current regulatory framework was increasingly difficult for industry to navigate.
“We have too many regulations slapped on top of each other, with competing objectives and not enough proper thought, not enough consultation with industry to do things properly,” Clark said.
Her comments followed broader industry concern across the Summit about expanding obligations on carriers, service providers and infrastructure operators, including new consumer, outage, resilience, security and digital platform-related requirements.
TRAFFIC FORECASTS KEEP BEING OVERTAKEN: Clark said the underlying pressures on internet infrastructure were not new, but demand shocks had repeatedly overtaken forecasts. She recalled earlier debates over the level of international bandwidth needed in Australia, saying assumptions about customer demand often reflected network bottlenecks rather than actual user requirements.
“If you take the total amount of international bandwidth we have right now and divide it by the number of consumers, guess what? That is 44 kilobits per second. That is why they only need 44 kilobits per second: because that is all we have on that bottleneck,” she said, referring to earlier bandwidth planning debates.
Clark said internet traffic had since been driven by successive waves of demand, including email, video, YouTube, social media, TikTok and now AI.
“When we finally think, we have got it now, we can dimension the networks and know how much we need, something comes along,” she said. She said AI would add to the strain, both through traffic demand and through the proliferation of poorly secured connected devices and software.
“We have now got this huge barrage of stuff that is not secured. It has not been created with much discipline in the software space and that was done by humans. Now we have AI tools to accelerate this once more again. I think we are in for an even wilder ride now,” she said.
MOBILE MONETISATION PRESSURE: The discussion also linked the need for a clearer telecommunications vision to the industry’s ability to fund future mobile network investment.
Chowdhury said the single largest strategic issue for mobile operators globally was monetisation, rather than technology, capital or regulation alone. He said the mobile sector faced weak revenue growth at the same time as it was expected to invest heavily in 5G
standalone, 6G, direct-to-device satellite, regional coverage, AI traffic and network resilience.
Citing GSMA forecasts, he said mobile operators globally were expected to achieve only around 1% average revenue per user growth year on year to 2030, while the industry would need to invest more than $1 trillion in new networks. He said that meant a very large share of future revenue growth would need to be spent on capital investment.
“That does not add up,” he said.
Chowdhury said mobile operators needed new sources of growth, including network APIs, enterprise services, private networks, internet of things and multi-tenant 5G environments such as airports and shopping centres. But he said those opportunities would require different commercial models and updated billing and operational support systems.
“At the moment it is very easy to say an operator needs to monetise its network better. But part of the problem is that most operators do not actually have a billing or charging system by which they could monetise the network better and that itself is a bit of a journey,” he said.
AI WORKING WHERE THE DATA WORKS: TM Forum executive vice president, AI Guy Lupo said AI was already delivering measurable gains in telco operations, but warned against overstating the sector’s progress towards full autonomy.
Lupo said AI was working best where data was structured, maintained and capable of being consumed by AI systems as a data product. He pointed to fault management and churn reduction as areas where telcos were seeing results.
“In fault management, specifically at scale, you will see double-digit improvement, like 33% in mean time to repair and almost 15% reduction in tickets in many telcos worldwide that have taken the initiative to go into fault management,” he said.
He said customer churn was also seeing double-digit improvement where telcos had the right data structures in place.
But Lupo said the promise of fully autonomous networks remained overhyped. “There are a lot of people claiming autonomy, but they are actually automating on steroids. That is a real issue,” he said.
“Automation on steroids has not touched the operating model. Fundamental changes are required in autonomous level four to actually be autonomous.”
Lupo said the key barrier was trust, arguing that companies could not simply claim
trustworthy AI systems. “Trust in the age of AI can no longer be claimed. It must be demonstrated,” he said.
SOVEREIGNTY BEYOND INFRASTRUCTURE: Lupo said the same principle should apply to AI sovereignty. He argued that the industry was wrongly equating sovereignty with infrastructure location, when the more important issue was operational trust and the ability to demonstrate how systems behaved at runtime.
“The hype is not sovereignty. It is actually sovereignty equals infrastructure,” he said. “Sovereignty is a runtime problem.”
He said some governments and companies were already considering mechanisms akin to “passports” or “birth certificates” for AI agents, requiring systems to demonstrate where they came from, what they could do and what permissions they had.
Chowdhury also cautioned against equating sovereignty solely with onshore infrastructure. “There is a big misunderstanding about sovereignty at the moment, which is that it needs to be onshore,” he said.
He said that did not mean telecommunications capability was irrelevant to sovereignty. On the contrary, he argued that a sustainable domestic telecommunications sector was part of a nation’s sovereign capability. “One reason why the telecommunications industry needs to be sustainable in the country is because I think it is important for a country’s sovereignty to have a telecoms industry that is capable,” he said.
DATA CENTRE DEMAND AND SECURITY CONCERNS: Losco said sovereignty had become a major driver of demand among large enterprise and government data centre customers. “Our largest enterprise and government customers are paranoid about sovereignty. It drives a lot of conversations and a lot of value for them,” he said.
He said Australia’s geography, rule of law, Five Eyes status, political stability, energy position and renewables potential made it attractive to global AI companies and hyperscalers seeking infrastructure in the region.
But Clark struck a more pessimistic note on whether sovereignty could be secured in practice, saying AI-enabled security tooling and zero-day exploitation meant “the horse has bolted” on many assumptions about data protection.
“I think this whole concept of sovereignty is gone,” she said.
Despite that warning, Lupo said telcos had an immediate opportunity to commercialise services that gave customers more control over data, privacy and AI workloads.
He said the industry had long sold VPNs, VLANs, VRFs and SD-WAN services, and could extend those capabilities into what he called “AI VPNs” or “AI WANs”. “The money is there and the need is there,” he said.
IN TODAY’S COMMSDAY (Friday 5 June 2026)
A South Australian locality with no recorded population and the ruins of a Lutheran church and school has been named by Nasdaq-listed IREN as the site of an 800MW AI data centre campus: one of the biggest planned in Australia to date with a likely cost of between $9 billion and $13.5 billion.
TPG Telecom said that spectrum licence renewal prices will impose a $2.1 billion n cost on the company over five years from 2028 to 2032, with the mobile operator arguing it will restrain competition and investment and create upward pressure on mobile pricing.
The Australian Telecommunications Alliance has stressed that existing regulation already requires carriers to support Triple Zero access during outages, after the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network commissioned a new survey asking consumers if they would support such regulation.
Superloop has upgraded its earnings guidance, with EBITDA expected to be in the range of $118 to $122 million, up from previous guidance of $112 to $120 million.
Telcos are among those participating in an annual two-day exercise to test Australia’s national disaster response and resilience capabilities that kicked off yesterday.
Internet Association of Australia CEO Narelle Clark has used her CommsDay Summit address to argue that internet exchanges remain critical to network performance, cost management and resilience as Australian traffic volumes continue to grow.
Tasmania’s peak body for the tech sector has welcomed the announcement by SUBCO and AI infrastructure provider Firmus of a new high-capacity cable linking the island state to the mainland.
Countries around that world are making sovereign AI a national strategy, and telcos have been some of the big beneficiaries, according to Red Hat telco regional director, ANZ and South Asia, Jonathan Ang.
Data centre developers risk creating “a very expensive island” if they treat connectivity as a later-stage issue rather than a core part of site selection, Critical Infrastructure Consulting’s Dan Whitford has warned.
One NZ has adopted cloud-native orchestration platform UiPath Maestro, cutting enterprise mobile provisioning times from ten days to less than ten minutes.
Spark has launched a New Zealand-first capability aimed at helping customers identify legitimate Spark calls and reduce the risk of impersonation scams.
FrontierSI’s PNT Labs has published the results of a study into the benefits of cloud-based correction services on positioning technologies, finding that with the right hardware, the technology can enable devices to achieve sub-metre accuracy.
US Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr proposed new rules to dramatically speed up approval and authorisation processes for new submarine cables and wireline infrastructure.
China has reportedly opened up part of its telecommunications sector to foreign firms, granting approval to an initial batch of 166 companies following a pilot program launched last year.
Plus more
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