Telstra paves way for mobile roaming during disasters after successful test in Queensland

Australia’s biggest telco has proven that it can allow mobile roaming during a natural disaster – now it just needs to lock in an agreement with Optus, TPG and the government.

Telstra has developed a solution to allow mobile roaming during a natural disaster.

Australia’s biggest telco is a step closer to allowing mobile roaming in natural disasters – allowing people to not only call triple-0 but friends and loved ones – after completing a successful test of the technology in Queensland.

Roaming allows people to transfer to a different network when their telco provider is unavailable, such as when travelling overseas. But its use has been limited locally amid concerns it could crash a rival’s network.

Telstra has been working on a solution with rivals TPG and Optus to allow roaming during bushfires, floods and other natural disasters. But it will only be available for a finite time and geographical area.

Telstra network engineering executive Channa Seneviratne.

It comes almost three months after senators probing Optus’ national outage asked why roaming wasn’t considered an option to ensure Australians remained connected during the meltdown.

Telstra technology development & innovation executive Channa Seneviratne said allowing roaming during a network outage could risk further network failures, which was why Telstra was focused on providing a solution limited to natural disasters.

“We design our networks with enough capacity for our customers and what we see as the growth,” Mr Seneviratne said.

“We don’t design our networks with sufficient overhead to take an influx of every other operator in the country. No one does. That’s just not feasible.”

But natural disasters are not like national outages, because only parts of the country are affected. This gives Telstra and other telcos greater capacity to share resources to ensure Australians remain connected without crashing each other’s networks.

“To be really clear, the capacity available is only the surviving network’s capacity,” Mr Seneviratne said.

“All we have is non-Telstra mobiles coming in to use the available resources which we now had to share with Telstra customers and whoever else during that time, so there’s no additional capacity as such – it’s really now available capacity now shared with more people.”

To ensure more connectivity to go around, roaming in natural disasters was limited to voice calls and texts, Mr Seneviratne said. There might be scope to have a small data allowance to perform brief WhatsApp calls. But Mr Seneviratne said it was “not intended for somebody to come on and start doing Netflix live streaming”.

“That’s not how it’s going to work,” he said. “Because we have to share the capacity, everybody is absolutely focused on emergency ­connectivity.

“When we turn this on, and we have customers coming in from the other two networks, we have to make sure that our network still survives, and that our customers and their customers can still make calls.”

Channa Seneviratne (second from right) discussed network design with (from left) Telstra's media general manager Steve Carey, head of global networks and technology division Nikos Katinakis, and technology discovery and validation lead Paul Milford last July.

Crucially, Mr Seneviratne said roaming would work even if a rival telco did not normally have coverage in a particular area.

“It’s, if you like, universal,” he said. “Telstra has obviously got more coverage in regional Australia than our competitors, and if a disaster occurs in regional Australia and the other two aren’t present because it’s been part of this process, it’s been declared a disaster, we will allow customers who belong to those other network providers – even though they don’t provide coverage – we will add them onto our network because it is part of this process.”

Telstra tested the roaming technology during a simulation at its 5G Innovation Centre on the Gold Coast. It started work developing the solution last March.

The simulation was performed in a lab environment and Mr Seneviratne said it was not intended to define the full solution, describing it as a first step to help guide ongoing discussions with industry and government.

“We will go as fast as we can, but we are dependent on the others (TPG and Optus),” he said.

“We can do what’s in our ­control.

“So we just want to collaborate well and with the government to get this in place.

“We were pretty happy that our simulation that we did last week worked because we got a lot of good (information) and because it’s very much an industry collaboration.

“We will work with the other two and say ‘look, this is what we learned, it’s our joint solution, we put it in, we learned this, here’s what we found’, so that it will inform the next stage of discussions in design.”

Originally published as Telstra paves way for mobile roaming during disasters after successful test in Queensland