Mitch Fifield backs Telstra on outages

Mitch Fifield has played down any prospect of forcing Telstra to share the findings of its network review

Communications Minister Mitch Fifield has played down any prospect of forcing Telstra to share the findings of its network review, adding he was happy with the telco’s response to a string of recent outages.

Senator Fifield told the Melbourne Press Club yesterday that Telstra CEO Andy Penn had been very upfront with the public that it was facing pressures and he had confidence the telco would be looking at its infrastructure exhaustively. “They’ll be undertaking a full review as to what are the common elements, if any, in relation to those various recent disruptions they’ve had,” he said.

“Telstra are keeping us updated on their work but ultimately it’s a matter for Telstra.”

The comments came as The Australian revealed yesterday that Telstra’s chief operating officer Kate McKenzie sent a letter to staff outlining a review of key infrastructure, after four separate outages in the past two months affected millions of customers.

Telstra brushed off concerns of fundamental weakness in its network but there are concerns that the telco’s core network may have deeper problems.

“For anything to hit them this hard, it has to be something in the core,” an industry source said.

Senator Fifield also defended the government’s use of copper in the NBN, despite criticism that the copper would need about $640 million in repair costs to be fit for purpose — about 10 times what the NBN had originally expected. “In terms of the last bit of copper to go to someone’s house, my advice from NBN is that there haven’t been issues with the copper and it hasn’t had to be replaced,” Senator Fifield said.

“Our predecessors, in the form of Stephen Conroy, took what I describe as a theological approach to the NBN, rather than a technology approach. We are technology agnostic when it comes to what are the modalities that can see the NBN roll out fastest and at lowest cost. Our opponents of late have been saying the NBN is off track, it’s not.

“We are aiming to have it finished by 2020, and the story of the NBN is a good one.”

Senator Fifield’s key agenda at the Press Club address was to sell the government’s long-delayed media reforms, which he said would “free the media of the cast iron shackles that constitute part of our media law today”.

“These laws date back to 1987. These rules are now impeding the capacity of media organisations to configure themselves in the way that best suits them,” he said.

The laws are set to be debated by the Senate in June.

Senator Fifield would not be drawn on funding changes to the ABC in the budget but said the broadcaster would be “appropriately resourced to do its job”.