Commissioner urges change to protect small businesses after Optus outage

The NSW Small Business Commissioner has called for improved communication and user rights in a submission to the Federal Government review of the November Optus outage.

Commissioner Chris Lamont said the lack of timely information from Optus during the outage caused significant distress to small businesses and hindered their ability to mitigate the impacts.

“Many small businesses suffered substantial financial losses due to the outage, as they were unable to operate at their usual capacity or at all,” Mr Lamont said.

The Commissioner recommended incident response and crisis management protocols be reviewed, and an emergency communication network established for telecommunications providers to communicate with Government and customers.

He noted a similar outage in Canada that affected 12 million users of cable internet and cellular networks led to new laws requiring all telecommunications providers to provide mutual assistance to one another in the event of an outage.

The Commissioner also encouraged consideration of additional consumer protections to guarantee basic rights of telecommunications users and provide powers to a national regulator to levy fines and high penalties when those rights were breached.

Read the full submission.