Telecommunications experts warn Australia’s major mobile providers are vulnerable to another major outage due to gradual cost-cutting and a critical lack of regulation.

  • Optus is investigating the cause of Wednesday’s nationwide outage.

  • Experts say telcos have been cost cutting, and have not properly safeguarded systems

  • They say the government should legislate redundancies in major telco systems

[Industry expert Mark] Gregory said Optus and Telstra have likely concluded that building highly advanced safeguards to their infrastructure and software is too expensive and have been allowed by the government to prioritise profit over the reliability of the service.