00:00 Michelle Rowland has been quite scathing in her approach to talking about how Optus was
00:07 communicating with customers and she's certainly been quite clear this morning saying that
00:11 many customers who were left out of pocket and inconvenienced as a result of yesterday's
00:15 outage should be expecting some form of compensation from the telco once it gets its house in order.
00:23 This is something that the Federal Government, it's not only Michelle Rowland who's making
00:28 these comments this morning but a number of frontbenchers joining these calls and joining
00:32 this ongoing criticism of Optus.
00:35 Michelle Rowland was very critical yesterday about how Optus was communicating with its
00:39 customers saying it was being too slow to act and while she had had discussions with
00:44 Optus executives, your average Optus customer didn't have that direct line to management
00:49 and was instead left very much in the dark.
00:52 She said that the company should have used broadcast platforms such as TV and radio to
00:57 get that message out there about what it was doing, what the outage was caused by and when
01:03 those services would be resumed and it took a number of hours for Optus to heed that message.
01:09 On the issue of compensation though, Michelle Rowland says it is something that needs to
01:13 be looked at.
01:14 If they are done wrong, if there is an outage of this nature that causes them to suffer
01:22 loss in some way, be that economic or otherwise, that corporations will do the right thing
01:28 by them and certainly I urge that in every case from Corporate Australia, including this
01:33 one.
01:34 I think that there is a reasonable expectation here.
01:36 The terms of reference for this inquiry are still being drawn up but the Minister has
01:40 been very clear that she wants to get to the bottom of what happened in this circumstance.
01:45 What caused this outage, what sort of contingencies were in place to ensure that Optus could get
01:50 its services back up and running and whether or not there are any lessons that can be learned
01:54 from this incident for the broader telecommunications industry and the occasion of other outages
02:01 into the future.
02:03 She says while it is good to see services back online, the fallout and the consequences
02:08 of yesterday's outage were incredibly significant and that is why the government needs to step
02:13 in here.
02:14 This is in addition to an inquiry which has already been launched by the Australian Communication
02:18 and Media Authority looking at whether or not emergency phone calls on mobiles could
02:23 still get through.
02:25 There are rules around that allowing effectively Optus customers in this instance to piggyback
02:29 off of other networks to make those emergency calls.
02:33 That is something that she says at the moment it looks like that did occur but ACMA will
02:36 be looking at that regardless.
02:39 Of course people who were landline customers of Optus didn't have that opportunity but
02:45 this inquiry by ACMA specifically looking at that mobile connectivity and whether or
02:51 not Optus abided by the rules in that instance.
02:54 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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