Telstra predicts no major market shifts after Optus outage

Telstra is anticipating no major market shifts in customer base to occur after last week’s full-day Optus outage, countering a narrative in parts of the industry that the incident could trigger a significant churn event.

Vicki Brady.

CEO Vicki Brady told Telstra’s investor day that Telstra had seen some customer inflow but did not expect it to last, or materially change share-of-market.

Brady prefaced her commentary by saying that both she, and Telstra, “take zero pleasure in seeing any competitor or operator experience major outages.”

“In terms of what we’ve seen post last week’s [Optus] outage, as you might anticipate we’ve seen some increase in acquisition of customers, and I know there’s been some speculation about how large that could be,” Brady said.

“I guess I would just go back to the [Optus] cyber breach last year … As we spoke about post that, we saw some elevated acquisition levels for around a six-week period but at the end of the day there wasn’t a significant shift in share in the market. 

“It is early days, [and] we are continuing to see some elevated levels of acquisition at the moment, but again I think you’ve got to put it in context of what we saw last year, and at this stage I wouldn’t anticipate major shifts in share.”

Brady said that the outage had resulted in more discussions about communications resilience among enterprise and government customers.

“We’re less than a week post the outage, but I think what it has reinforced for customers - and particularly some of those larger government and enterprise customers - is probably a look at resilience: what sort of resilience have they got in place for their communications needs?” she said.

“I think probably last week has brought that to the top of the list for many organisations in the country.”

The telco devoted several slides in its investor presentation to the resiliency of its network infrastructure, and to its own efforts in that space.

Several mostly mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) claimed customer inflows during and immediately following the Optus incident, although these claims could not be independently verified, and it was unclear if users were simply seeking a working temporary connection due to their primary connection being out.