General News
23 September, 2025
EDITOR'S SAY: It's not just Optus that is risking lives
Matt Nicholls writes about his decade of experience dealing with telcos in remote Queensland.
While the nation might have been shocked to hear that Optus had last week let down Australians living in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory with the failure of its triple-0 call system, leading to at least three deaths, there would have been many living in remote Queensland who were not surprised by the devastating outage.
While Optus' actions – or lack of action – was appalling, the telco is not alone in its failure to serve Australians.
I have been running newspapers in remote North West and Far North Queensland for the past decade and I've got countless stories of when Telstra has failed to provide a service.
Now this hasn't always been the same situation as Optus – last week, users could make phone calls to others but couldn't connect to triple-0 – but it could be just as deadly.
Talk to people on Mornington Island, or in Coen in Cape York, or in Seisia at the tip of the Australian continent, and they'll all tell you the same thing: You cannot rely on Telstra, especially in the wet season.
In fact, in early 2024, I caught Telstra in a major cover-up when it lied regarding an outage at one of its towers. The reason why remote Cape York residents couldn't make a call, including to triple-0? They hadn't put enough fuel in the backup generator.
That Christmas, a mother from Napranum, an Aboriginal community on the outskirts of Weipa in the Gulf of Carpentaria, had to flag down someone on the road and take her child to the hospital for life-threatening medical treatment because she couldn't call triple-0.
In all of my years of writing about the failures of Australia's telcos in remote communities, I've always heard the same excuses from the people in charge. Usually, they blame the weather or hard-to-reach access to fix problems that arise.
But this, as we've seen from Optus last week, is a matter of life and death. The fact is that Telstra's network is not as resilient as it should be. A lack of a fibre-optic loop connecting the North West and Gulf to the Cape is part of the problem. If the line is cut anywhere, it causes widespread outages.
Australia should look to Europe to fix the problem. Want the major telcos to improve service? Hit them with much bigger penalties as a result of their failures. Federal MPs Warren Entsch (now retired) and Bob Katter have both spoken out about major telco faults over the past decade, but Australia needs real legislation that would enforce accountability.
Our telecommunications in the bush are not good enough when they are working, but outages can be catastrophic. We need a higher standard.
