How much worse it would have been without the NBN

The Optus chief executive had to go. But not for the reasons you probably think.

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin appears before Senate inquiry following the November 8 outage.

Two big points about the Optus train wreck.

First, CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin had to go and go immediately.

Secondly, and far more importantly, thank goodness for the NBN.

Yes, it was and remains silly to claim she should have ‘taken responsibility for’ and ‘fallen on her sword because of’ the outage.

Even if you combine it with the earlier data breach.

Did the Medibank CEO David Koczkar resign over its data hack? Have all the bank CEOs resigned over their from time-to-time outages?

The idea that the CEO of a major and complicated business is directly responsible for these crashes is stupid. The idea that the CEO is even indirectly responsible is only slight less so.

So, should Rosmarin have gone because of her ‘bad PR’? Going missing in action in real outage time? And then when put under the hammer by the - always, preening - senators?

Again, it’s just plain silly to suggest she could have done anything worthwhile, far less substantive in the public space, while the phones were down. Better to focus on trying to get it actually fixed.

As for the senators, I’m not big on the idea of people prostrating themselves before a paddling of preening pompous pygmies, who have zero interest in arriving at the truth and even less in getting effective outcomes or solutions.

But what did it for her was far simpler and even time-honoured: saying it was ‘the boss’s fault’. That it was caused by something the Singapore parent had done.

Without getting too deeply into the murky and messy detail – if Singapore was going to ‘do something’ to the global network; shouldn’t Optus have taken pre-emptive precautions? – this was a career-cancelling blunder by Rosmarin.

Especially as it enables, indeed all-but invited, Singtel-Optus to draw the line and ‘start afresh’. And the sooner you start – like, over the weekend – the irresistible better.

As for the NBN point, remember all the ‘tech freaks’- mostly, the same ‘experts’ who had previously demanded we go all-fibre from the NBN-start – who’d claimed that 5G mobile would render the entire NBN obsolete?

Who would want or need the fixed-line NBN, when ‘everyone’ moved ‘entirely’, seamlessly 24/7, to smartphones (not even tablets, far less laptops; and as for desktops?).

I’m not quite sure how many would have preferred watching the World Cup cricket final streamed on a smartphone as opposed to a 75in TV, but that aside.

The bottom line, as we’ve just seen, is that a 5G network can ‘go down’. I wouldn’t try to claim it was impossible with the NBN; but it’s a lot harder and more unlikely.

More fundamentally, the NBN can exist and thrive without the 5G networks; the reverse is fundamentally not the case; they cannot function without the NBN.

There used to be an ad: have you driven a Ford lately?

I think of a slightly modified version with the NBN: have you heard someone complaining about it lately?

Covid proved the worth of the NBN; it proved the worth specifically of Malcolm Turnbull’s abandonment of the Rudd-Conroy all-fibre fantasy.

We now have and have had for half-a-decade, a fully-functioning NBN that can and is now building out fibre, crucially, off a functioning Australia-pervasive business.

If we’d stuck with the original all-fibre plan, barely a third of Australia would have had a functioning NBN going into Covid, and still, in 2023, large swathes of the country would be waiting for it.

In that environment the Optus outage would have been far more catastrophic.

Originally published as How much worse it would have been without the NBN