Telstra’s nationwide mobile outage in July wiped an estimated $552 million from the Australian economy, according to new modelling that consumer advocates will put before senators this week.
The estimate, seen by this masthead, was prepared by FTI Consulting for the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network. It is more than 500 times what Telstra has paid out in compensation.
Telstra said it had received about 33,000 complaints and compensation claims, had resolved 99 per cent of them and had paid out about $1 million.
ACCAN chief executive Carol Bennett said households and small businesses had carried the cost. “One outage cost this economy over half a billion dollars, but the telco at fault didn’t foot the bill,” she said.
“Australian households and small businesses did.”
“People are paying a premium for Telstra services in the belief that they are getting better coverage, better service, better reliability, and none of those things apply in this instance,” Bennett told this masthead.
Telstra said it had not seen the research. “On the face of it they appear to rely on a range of assumptions about broader economic impacts that don’t reflect the nature or duration of the outage and significantly overstate its economic effect,” a Telstra spokesman said.
FTI said consulting Telstra to test its assumptions had been outside the scope of its work. Bennett described the estimate as “grossly conservative”.
Telstra chair Craig Dunn told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting on Tuesday that the outage “should not have happened”.
The outage began at 2.50am on July 8, when a GPS card in a Melbourne equipment room reset after a power supply was replaced and told the network the date was 2006. More than 8 million Australians could not make calls or use mobile data, according to the FTI report. Hundreds of Triple Zero calls failed and regional trains in Victoria and NSW stopped.
FTI estimated the outage’s direct costs at about $130 million, excluding lost leisure time and unpaid wages. Fed into an economic model, that became a $302 million hit to output, and $552 million in lost gross domestic product once flow-on effects were counted.
Lost business productivity was the largest single cost, at $104.2 million.
FTI calculated that figure would have been $39 million if every worker had lost 15 minutes, and $310 million if all had lost two hours.
It also described its findings as a conservative lower bound that left out rail freight and the heavier toll in areas where Telstra is the only provider. Telstra told a Senate inquiry in December it had recorded 5221 mobile tower outages lasting more than 10 minutes in those areas in 2025.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said its investigation into whether Telstra met its obligations was ongoing, and it could not say when it would finish. It could seek penalties of up to $30 million per breach, though an investigation does not mean the regulator has formed a view that the law has been broken.
The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has received 397 complaints about the outage. ACCAN and other consumer groups want it to lift its $1500 cap on compensation for non-financial loss to about $15,000, and the ombudsman said it was reviewing the cap.
A spokesperson for Communications Minister Anika Wells said telcos were expected to deliver “fair, expedited and efficient compensation”, but did not address the modelling.
The modelling comes as the Senate debates the Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation bill on Tuesday, which would give the communications minister power to make reliability standards for mobile networks.
ACCAN wants the bill amended to make those standards enforceable and to introduce domestic roaming, which would let Australians switch to a rival network when their own fails.
“Mobile networks are the only essential service in Australia without enforceable reliability and performance requirements,” Bennett said.
Dunn argued against mandated roaming, saying it “does not build a single new mobile tower” and would make it harder to justify regional investment. The Telstra’s chairman said emergency calls already switched to any available network, so roaming “would have no impact on access to Triple Zero”.
Opposition communications spokeswoman Sarah Henderson said the Coalition’s amendments would ensure the findings of the competition watchdog’s inquiry into mobile services, including roaming, were properly considered. That inquiry is due to report next year.
“The ACCC has expressed concern about declining regional telco investment and it would be irresponsible to disregard its very significant inquiry including into mobile roaming,” Henderson said. “The cost of network outages to the economy is alarming.”
Bennett said waiting for the ACCC would delay reliability standards by at least a year.
“Senators now have a safety case, an economic case and a yearlong Senate inquiry which all point the same way,” she said. “The legislation is before them this week, and they should act.”
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