Senate holds hope that large-scale roaming possible during outages

A senate inquiry into last year’s Optus outage has expressed hope that the impact of future incidents of a similar scale may be offset by the emergence of large-scale roaming arrangements.

The inquiry handed down its report [pdf] into Optus’ handling of the November 8 2023 outage at the end of last week, after several extensions to its deadline.

The most noteworthy recommendation made by senators is that “the Australian government works with telecommunications carriers to examine large-scale network roaming and mutual assistance arrangements for major outages.”

There is some work already underway involving the government and telecommunications sector, that aims to allow people in disaster-affected areas to temporarily roam on a different network, if their own provider’s infrastructure and services are down.

Telcos have warned that expanding this to cover larger areas, or even to operate nationally during a major outage, is not currently feasible for technical, administrative and financial reasons.

However, the senate committee remains hopeful that these constraints can be overcome over time.

It said that while current feasibility work “is focused on roaming capabilities to be implemented in times of natural disasters only, and not during major outages, the committee considers that this is just the first step and encourages continued government and industry efforts to test the feasibility and practicality of nation-wide roaming during network outages.”

The committee also backed existing work underway that would force telcos to better communicate outages to customers.

It also suggested there should be “appropriate compensation” to customers in the event of future large-scale outages.