Optus fiasco to spill over to rival telcos as Bayer Rosmarin shifts the blame on failed 000 calls

Like the banking and casino royal commissions, Optus’s national meltdown threatens to ripple across the entire sector now senators are involved and Bayer Rosmarin plays the political game.

If Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is going down, she is determined to take as many people within Australia’s telecommunications industry with her.

Ten days after Optus’s national network collapsed, Bayer Rosmarin appeared at a Senate inquiry into the outage that left more than 200 Australians not able to call emergency services on Triple-zero, underscoring the severity of the shut down.

But despite talk of accepting accountability, the Optus boss gives the impression of being defiant and not grasping the full gravity of the meltdown.

Bayer Rosmarin told Senators that hours after the outage hit she was not aware that Australians could not call Triple-zero on Optus fixed phone lines.

“We absolutely believe that the Triple-zero system should have worked and it’s critical for all Australians that the system can be relied upon,” she said.

No disagreement there. But she went further, making an extraordinary claim that it wasn’t entirely Optus’s fault.

“We don’t manage the triple zero system. It’s a very complex system that involves all the carriers. It involves the device manufacturers.

“What I’m trying to explain is the Triple-zeros system itself should have helped our customers during the outage and we will take accountability for any role we’ve had in that.

“But there are also probably changes that need to be made in other parts of that system, potentially with different devices - because that was the determinant of whether you could or could not complete the call, the device settings - and possibly with the way that the system works.”

While the ability for telcos to work more closely together during outages and natural disasters to ensure Australians is welcome, it’s important to first look at the facts from last Wednesday.

If a telco’s fixed network is down, that means no communications of any kind - it doesn’t work like a mobile network where there is an “emergency camp” in which a device searches for another provider if it cannot connect to its own.

The fact that Bayer Rosmarin was unaware that people could not dial Triple-zero on landlines, as one telco insider said, is symptomatic of an “internal management error” in which network staff didn’t relay the problem to the executive and crisis management meetings.

The other key point, is that the Triple-zero system didn’t fail, but Optus’s capability to link to it did.

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin appears before Senate inquiry following the November 8 outage, at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

As for the device manufacturers, they all must comply with Australian standards developed by the Communications Alliance.

“There is no evidence that customer devices used to facilitate delivery of Triple-zero calls failed and if they did that would still be Optus’s fault in not checking those devices, they supplied to customers were compliant,” A industry insider said.

The main fault was in Optus’s inability to pass a call from their end consumer to Telstra’s network.

All these arguments will be unpacked during the Senate’s inquiry, with Bayer Rosmarin’s comments an attempt to shift the spotlight away from Optus onto all of Australia’s telcos and global device manufacturers. It’s a tactic that potentially could backfire, laying the path for further regulation and policy reform, placing the entire industry under heightened scrutiny.

Parallels can be drawn with the banking and casino royal commissions, which began at CBA and Crown Resorts respectively before snowballing across the sector.

Crucially, it is also an attempt to shift the blame and mounting political and public anger from Optus, which Bayer Rosmarin revealed had not planned for a nationwide outage as part of its risk management drills.

But it’s a strategy that’s not new at the telco. During last year’s cyber attack, she protested that the telco was the victim of crime. This week, Singtel was fingered as the international network that completed an upgrade, sparking Optus’s meltdown.

Although Bayer Rosmarin attempted to clarify laying any blame at Singtel, Optus’s Singapore government-controlled owner.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young during a Senate inquiry following the November 8 Optus outage. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

“We had put out the statement which then got interpreted by various commentators as being that the root cause was the Singtel upgrade, when the trigger was the Singtel upgrade, but the root cause was the (Optus) routers.”

It did little to convince Senators. Inquiry chair Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young branded Optus’s communications as “very lousy”, while Labor Senator Karen Grogan criticised the chief executive’s evidence as “fluffy”.

As for her own future, Bayer Rosmarin dodged questions about her own future and media reports that she could resign as early as next week.

“It has not been a time to be thinking about myself. My focus is on the team, the customers, the community.” And increasingly, dragging in rival telcos into Optus’s spiralling crisis.