Optus crisis to shake up telco market
The Optus outage is forecast to hasten a shake-up of the telecommunications industry, threatening the Singaporean-owned group’s mobile market share as it scrambles to stop customers from fleeing after massive disruption to internet and phone services on Wednesday.
As politicians and business lobby groups demanded that Optus pay compensation to customers disrupted by the 14-hour outage, the company offered some mobile phone customers 200 gigabytes of extra data late on Thursday – estimated to be worth between zero and $70 depending on usage.
Optus briefed its staff about the company’s 14 per cent slide in half-year earnings at its Sydney headquarters on Thursday. Louise Kennerley
Federal communications minister Michelle Rowland launched an inquiry into what Optus has only explained as “technical fault” or “network event”, and how it could have been mitigated.
Victorian premier Jacinta Allan said Optus’ response to the outage “could have been better” and that the state would review its relationships with the telco group.
Former competition watchdog chairman Allan Fels joined the fray, claiming that Optus’ woes could “facilitate” the rise of TPG Telecom, which trails Optus and market leader Telstra in the mobile phone market. “Obviously, there will be a big loss of customers, that will affect the market’s structure,” Mr Fels told The Australian Financial Review.
Analysts have also begun speculating how much money Telstra and other telco groups could make from picking up disgruntled Optus customers; JP Morgan forecast that Telstra could gain up to $125 million in earnings over the next few years.
Optus, which reported a 14 per cent slide in earnings before interest and taxation to $141 million on Thursday for the six months
Read more on afr.com
