CENTRE Alliance Senator Stirling Griff will move for an inquiry into telecommunications stability and security following Telstra’s second significant network failure in less than a month.
The outage affected the South East last week.
Senator Griff said he had long held concerns about the security of the nation’s telecommunications, including the operation of mobile phone towers during natural disasters and prolonged blackouts.
“These latest outages highlights to everyone how fragile the entire system can be,” he said.
“How can Australia’s largest telco network not have effective redundancies to reroute traffic and manage a quicker return to service during major outages?
“Network failures have a massive and widespread impact – people’s lives are put at risk, businesses are impacted – so we need to take a closer look at what we can do to prevent or at least lessen the impact of widespread outages in future.”
Senator Griff intends to introduce a motion for a senate inquiry when sitting resumes in June.
Senator Griff’s concerns came to a head after last week’s Telstra outage left millions of Australians without voice and data services for hours.
The telco has since blamed software problems for the issue.
