Singtel boss’s subtle backing for Optus chief in crisis
Luke Costin, Sam McKeith and Farid Farid |
The Singaporean owners of Optus will give embattled chief executive Stephen Rue more time to right the beleaguered telco as confidence in triple-zero availability declines.
Singtel chief executive Yuen Kuan Moon held a crisis meeting with federal Communications Minister Anika Wells in Sydney on Tuesday following two emergency call outages in two weeks.
The pair, flanked by Mr Rue and the Optus chair John Arthur, discussed technical details about the outages as well as ways to restore trust in Australia’s No.2 telco.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Mr Moon was asked whether he maintained confidence in Mr Rue, who was appointed in November 2024 after another major outage claimed the job of his predecessor.
Moon initially tried to have Optus chair John Arthur answer questions before offering gentle backing of Mr Rue, a former NBN Co boss.
“It’s a people issue and it takes time to change and transform the people,” Mr Moon said.
“He is here to provide the solution.”
Mr Arthur offered more full-throated backing, reiterating that Mr Rue’s cultural change at Optus is “a work in progress”, while stressing he has only been in the job for under a year.
“(It) was a process-related issue, people made mistakes,” Mr Arthur said.
“It’s not a question of investment.
“In due course, we will be speaking about the Singtel investment in Australia, which goes beyond Optus.”
Human error has been blamed for the cause of the September 18 outage, which cut off people using mobile phones in three states from the triple-zero system during a firewall upgrade.
Optus says the first step of the upgrade – diverting calls to a separate part of the core network – was not followed.
A second outage on Sunday in Dapto, south of Sydney, was a separate technical issue.
However, industry experts say Optus needs to explain why triple-zero calls weren’t diverted to other networks, through a redundancy known as a camp-on mechanism.
Australians needed to have confidence in their telcos, particularly at their time of greatest need, the communications minister said.
“That’s why I’ve asked Optus to … find a way to have an external account in their systems so that Australians can have confidence in external investigation and advice, rather than just hearing from Optus again that it will be fine,” Ms Wells told reporters in Sydney.
Optus apologised to 4500 customers in the NSW south coast town of Dapto after they were unable to make emergency calls for eight hours on Sunday morning.
The revelation came after Optus suffered an outage on September 18 that hit households in SA, WA and the NT, that’s been linked to three deaths.
That incident is the subject of an Optus probe and a federal communications watchdog investigation.
The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network wants Ms Wells to use licensing powers to mandate independent technical oversight of emergency and network reliability systems at Optus.
“This would provide some assurance that there is strict oversight preventing further failures,” network chief executive Carol Bennett said in a statement.
“The community must have confidence that the emergency call system works 100 per cent of the time when they most need it.”
Griffith University competition and retail expert Graeme Hughes said the best outcome for customers would be a “mandatory systemic overhaul” guaranteed by Singtel and overseen by an external and impartial review.
“The localised September 28 Dapto outage confirmed the repeated failure of the fundamental ‘camp-on’ failsafe, endangering public safety,” he told AAP,
The camp-on mechanism is when a triple-zero call fails to connect from a phone user’s network and is then automatically routed through another provider.
Mr Rue took over as the company’s chief executive in 2024 from Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who resigned after the nationwide outage.
AAP
