The other Optus question
There is a deeper philosophical question to ask about Optus that goes beyond the future of Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.
Can Kelly Bayer Rosmarin hang on in the top job at Optus? It’s a question that probably won’t go away for a while, and one that she herself sidestepped on Friday during a grilling from a Senate inquiry into the telco’s recent nationwide network outage.
Yet in the wake of that damaging incident there is a deeper philosophical question about Optus to ask. Would it be in a better position to serve its customers, and to compete with its rivals Telstra and TPG Telecom, if it were unshackled from the constraints of an offshore owner?
This isn’t necessarily a criticism of Optus' parent SingTel, even though it is known for keeping a notoriously tight grip on its Australian subsidiary; or to absolve the local Optus management from their slow and inadequate responses to the outage and last year's data breach. It’s more about a suboptimal business structure, and the extent to which that may be contributing to Optus’ problems.
Optus is both a critical infrastructure provider and an enormous consumer business, with around 10 million retail customers. Is there another company that falls into both of those categories in Australia that is also under foreign ownership? On top of this, SingTel itself is controlled by an arm of the Singapore government.
