Optus was down in most of Sydney for over 10 hours. Some country/outlying areas were back online a little before then.

In response to hours of silence from Optus executives (in that they weren't able to string two words together about the technical issues or the source of the fault) one caller to ABC Local Radio in Sydney asked whether the fault was in Australia or in Singapore which was an excellent question as Optus is owned by Singtel (Singapore Telecommunications Limited).

The logic behind the call was to ask about how much of the Optus infrastructure actually exists in Singapore. If, say, much of the technical control is done from there then it may have been hard to quickly diagnose the problem with the system infrastructure split across two countries.

This is important because when Optus was sold to Singtel there was much concern about the security of its telecommunications if another country had access to user data, etc. At the time we were told the Australian Government was happy with the security arrangements that were put in place but many were not completely satisfied with the assurance.

Given the huge data breach that Optus experienced some months ago and that that matter has not been resolved by any stretch there will have to be a fully-fledged inquiry into the failure and hopefully it will get to the bottom of how Singtel actually runs Optus.

That said, some background is needed for overseas readers.

Australia has a long, long history of screwing up telecommunications, radio and TV broadcasting not to mention spectrum management. Too involed to describe here in detail but briefly the stuff-ups and political shenanigans would fill volumes and they go right back to the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1905 and the Postmaster General's Act. The Govt. PMG's Dept. had exclusive monopoly over the phone network for nearly a century (like Ma Bell but govt. owned). It later became Telecom Australia but still govt. owned. Still later the then Government sold it off and it's now a public corp under the name Telstra.

To maximize income from the Telstra sell-off the Government sold it off in two stages, and to make the sale attractive to investors it sold the telco complete—lock, stock and barrel without due consideration of the public interest. That is, instead of just selling off the exchanges and phone network infrastructure the Government also sold off all cableways and rights-of-way across the nation as a bundled deal. Also, it never put sufficiently tight regulations or conditions in place to protect customers and they've since been screwed rotten by all telcos—horrible deals, little or no service—for instance, witness today's Optus outage!

The sale of the cableways came back to bite the Government later when it needed to establish the NBN—National Broadband Network—as it had to buy back access to Telstra cableways which cost many billions—it's a huge scandal the Government somehow swept under the carpet. Also, the competition couldn't use the Telstra cableways, Optus had to completely install its new network onto power poles.

This first-class fuckup has now been 'amortized' into a surcharge that everyone across Australia has to pay for internet and phone. The extra billions have had to come from somewhere and it's the poor hapless consumer that has been paying the bill.

(In the past I've suggested some enterprising person do a PhD on the subject and in the process determine the extra per capita costs that every citizen is now paying over and above what he/she ought to have been paying had there been prudent management and less destructive politics.)

Incidentally, the NBN itself was further fucked up by politics, half-measures and technical compromises, it's story in itself. Just this week there's been an announcement that NBN network prices are to be increased.

Into this almighty shemozzle comes Telstra's competition, Vodafone and Optus. These telcos have also benefited from slack regulations, very poor consumer law and seemingly nonexistent technical oversight by Government.

Right, when it comes to telecommutations, Australia is the laughing stock of the world and its citizens have been taken for a very expensive ride.