From CommsDay of 10 July 2026
Our Story of the Week is from today’s CommsDay and concerns the recent Telstra outage that had wide impacts across other economic sectors (espoecially regional rail transport in NSW and Victoria). You will have heard all about the outage in other daily media, and about the response from Telstra and the reactions of political and other commentators. These aspects have also been covered in CommsDay earlier in the week. Today’s article is from a different perspective. It covers telecoms sector comment about the reasonableness or otherwise of enterprise users relying on a single source for mission critical functionality to be available at all times. These comments do not of course relieve Telstra and other telecommunications network operators from responsibility for their systems and of the need to review and upgrade them. But they do invite a broader perspective on the matter and on the responsibilities of users to back-up critical functions in their own operations in appropriate ways. Unlike coverage of the outage and its impacts, this perspective appears not to have been covered in mainstream public media – at least not yet.
Industry figures push back on Telstra outage political pile-on
A major telecommunications industry backlash has emerged against the political criticism of Telstra following this week’s national outage, led by digital infrastructure entrepreneur Bevan Slattery arguing the disruption exposed serious resilience failures among enterprise users relying on a single mobile network.
Slattery’s social media intervention yesterday attracted more than 1,100 reactions and scores of supportive comments from telecommunications, technology and infrastructure executives, many of whom questioned why operationally critical systems had been designed without effective carrier diversity or tested failover arrangements.
“Let’s be really clear here. The fact that the failure of a single mobile network, that is designed to run 99.95% of the time, brought down entire rail networks is an issue with the network architecture for the rail operator, not Telstra,” Slattery said, in allusion to one of the highest proϐile casualties of the outage.
The outage’s most visible effects included failed EFTPOS transactions and the suspension of regional passenger and freight services in Victoria and NSW. The Australian Rail Track Corporation’s National Train Communications System was disrupted because it uses Telstra’s 4G network to enable network control centres to communicate with train drivers through an in-cab radio system. The outage affected V/Line regional train services in Victoria, with replacement buses continuing in some areas yesterday. The Hunter and Southern Highlands lines in NSW had resumed operations as of yesterday.
The disruptions prompted criticism of Telstra across much of the political spectrum. However, Slattery said expectations of uninterrupted mobile availability failed to recognise the complexity of modern packet-based networks and the trade-offs between coverage, price and reliability.
“If you own critical infrastructure or a critical resource in which connectivity is mandatory for the operation of your business, it is incumbent upon you and your organisation to have the necessary network resiliency built in to your business, or suffer the consequences when a 99.95% network hits the 0.05% of downtime,” he said.
“Everyone expects pricing to be going down, not up, reliability to continue to be improving to the point of never failing and coverage of their area, but also the latest in technology and 5G across the nation. You can pick any two.”
“For the industry’s sake, we need to start stepping back from politically kicking mobile operators every time there is an outage, especially if the Triple Zero failover worked.”
Dreamtilt director Adrian Robertson, who also heads member association WISPAU, said political attacks on carriers could reinforce
the false expectation that enterprises did not need to arrange their own connectivity redundancy. “The public political kicking of telcos
when outages occur is just adding to the lack of trust from the public and a false expectation that there is no need to consider redundancy of connectivity if you are running critical operations,” Robertson said.
Former Verizon and Telefonica exec Ronan Dunne said the failure of transport and payment services demonstrated how little redundancy had been built into some front-line systems. “To see payment systems fail with no apparent failover is remarkable from a risk acceptance point of view for any consumer-facing commercial organisation,” Dunne said. “There are a few audit and risk committees that will be re-looking at their risk registers on foot of this incident.”
WHAT THEY SHOULD DO: Suggested resilience measures included connections to multiple mobile operators, diverse fixed network routes, satellite backup and regularly tested business continuity procedures.
BAI Communications principal consultant Greg Pennefather said public mobile networks should not be the sole communications path for systems capable of halting transport operations. “As soon as I saw that this outage took down a transit rail network, I thought, who would use a carrier’s cellular network to carry operational critical data?” he said. “Public networks should only ever be used for services that will not impact operations in a failure mode.”
Questions have also been raised about whether backup communications already specified for parts of the rail network operated as intended. One industry participant pointed to ARTC documentation stating Iridium satellite terminals should be installed in train cabins as a backup to the 4G network.
Former IPSTAR network chief Adam Leeflang said responsibility should be shared between carriers and their enterprise customers. “Carriers absolutely have a responsibility to build resilient networks and continually remove single points of failure,” he said. “But if your business depends on a single carrier remaining available 100% of the time, that’s also an architectural decision. The goal shouldn’t be to engineer a system where nothing ever breaks. It should be to engineer one where a single failure doesn’t become a business failure.”
Long Street Advisers CEO Mohammad Chowdhury said governments also needed to recognise that higher mobile resilience required adequate radio resources, investment incentives and more advanced network architectures. “Governments in Australia also need to recognise that the mobile industry needs sufficient spectrum and encouragement to go to network architectures that provide
what the nation expects, but doesn’t pay for,” Chowdhury said.
He said this included greater support for 5G standalone and 5G-Advanced capabilities, as well as preparation for 6G. “The mobile industry alone shouldn’t be held responsible for all the performance required, but to provide the base,” he said.
Some industry figures cautioned that Telstra could not be insulated entirely from scrutiny.
Former PCCW and HKT group chief technology officer Paul Berriman said improvements were required to reduce telecommunications failures caused by software updates.
SiteXcell MD Lisa Hall said telcos regularly positioned their networks alongside electricity, water and other essential utilities when seeking favourable government policy, funding and regulation. “If that’s the comparison being made, it’s reasonable to ask why the same expectations around reliability and service standards shouldn’t apply as well,” Hall said.
Federal opposition frontbencher Senator Andrew Bragg also departed from the broader political pile-on, although he used the outage to attack Australia’s economic and regulatory settings rather than defend Telstra’s technical performance directly.
“Sadly, people are going to have to get used to this in Australia because this is becoming the new normal,” Bragg told Channel Nine. He blamed high taxes, regulation, the size of government and a lack of competition and innovation, describing Australia as being on a “highway to hell.”
“It happened last year, it’s happened this year, it happens every year,” he said. “This is what happens when you have a socialist-style approach. Ultimately, you have less competition, less innovation.”
Bragg doubled down in an ABC interview, describing Australia as having a “sclerotic economy” constrained by high company taxes, rigid industrial relations laws and excessive regulation. “We’re stuck with effectively the same large companies that we had about a hundred years ago, and it’s not good for consumers because there are not those usual market sensors which push companies to do the right thing,” he said.
POLITICAL BACKLASH AGAINST TELSTRA: Greens communications spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young maintained the political pressure on Telstra, condemning what she described as an “absolute failure” that had caused widespread disruption and concern. She reiterated that the Greens would introduce legislation imposing reliability obligations on telecommunications providers, arguing that mobile companies were not subject to comparable service standards to electricity suppliers.
Hanson-Young also renewed her call for stronger penalties, including potential criminal sanctions for executives where companies repeatedly failed to deliver services. She said telecommunications rules should be set by parliament rather than principally through industry self-regulation.
Meanwhile, Telstra CFO Michael Ackland said the carrier had resolved both the initial outage and a subsequent issue affecting some calls, including Triple Zero. The secondary problem, which arose from the same software defect, caused some callers to receive an error message before their handset attempted to connect to another network.
Ackland said backup systems and welfare-check processes remained in place, although no further checks had been required after the fix was implemented. Telstra completed 639 welfare checks during the incident, with 170 cases referred to police and seven customers referred to emergency services after indicating they required assistance.
Around 33,000 Triple Zero calls were connected during the day, although Ackland said any emergency call failing to get through was unacceptable. Telstra has begun a full root-cause analysis and continued working with a small number of enterprise customers experiencing residual impacts. CEO Vicki Brady was returning to Australia after cutting short a period of leave.
Grahame Lynch & Rohan Pearce
IN TODAY’S COMMSDAY (Friday 10 July 2026)
A major telecommunications industry backlash has emerged against the political criticism of Telstra following this week’s national outage, led by digital infrastructure entrepreneur Bevan Slattery arguing the disruption exposed serious resilience failures among enterprise users relying on a single mobile network.
NBN Co remains on track to commence the testing of LEO satellite services in the current half, the company has confirmed to CommsDay.
Fibre-to-the-curb remained the most fault-prone fixed-line technology on the NBN on a per-service basis during the March quarter, although the latest ACCC data also showed some issues across the expanding FTTP network.
Superloop has been named Australia’s fastest fixed network for the first half of 2026 by Ookla. This is the third consecutive time Ookla’s Speedtest Awards places Superloop at the top of fixed network speeds.
SpaceX has filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission for a third generation constellation that will feature 100,000 satellites in two very low Earth orbit shells.
Radio Spectrum Management is seeking feedback on proposed approaches to making the 3340-3460MHz frequency band available for potential use by regional fixed wireless broadband, private mobile networks and New Zealand-wide mobile networks.
Myriota’s customer pipeline for its HyperPulse 5G Non-Terrestrial Network offering appears to be building around 10x faster than its earlier to market UltraLite offering, according to CEO Ben Cade.
Australia has commissioned a temporary space tracking terminal on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands to support all four planned missions in India’s Gaganyaan human spaceflight program.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is assessing Motorola Solutions’ proposed acquisition of Israel-based counter-unmanned aircraft system technology provider D-Fend Solutions.
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