Why are nationwide telco network outages still a thing in 2023?
Optus is not the first network to suffer a national outage, and it won't be the last. That's taken for granted, but may not need to be.
Millions of Optus customers left the safety of their home Wi-Fi on Wednesday morning to find an unseemly SOS message where the 5G bars usually sit on their mobile. The nation’s second biggest telco was down from Broome to Byron Bay and every major city in between.
That put Optus right back in the hotseat, still warm from the telco’s databases being so notoriously hacked last year. Yet the problem goes beyond one carrier in one country. Vodafone and Telstra have both endured national outages in recent years, as have international peers like America’s T-Mobile and Japan’s KDDI.
Even experts are surprised that the entire network of a major national mobile operator can go down in 2023 – five decades on from the launch of the first cellular networks in the country.
“It shouldn’t be happening, but it’s happened to all the telcos,” said Mark Gregory of RMIT's school of engineering. “It’s really time that the government steps in.”
