The Australian bushfire season of 2019-2020 was unprecedented in its scale and damage.
A Climate Council Study indicated that 14% of the adult population (2.9 million adults) were directly impacted.35
Both mobile and fixed services were affected by widespread fires. There were 888 outages of over four hours and 20,000 NBN services were disrupted.36 While direct fire damage to a site accounted for less than 1% of outage incidents, 88% of extended outages (across fixed and mobile networks) were due to a power supply interruption when, for example, power lines came down (see Figure 7.2).37
The subsequent Royal Commission into Natural Disaster Arrangements concluded telecommunications reform should focus on improving resilience, network coverage, recovery policies and the relationships between network operators and emergency services.
Given the expanse of Australia's energy infrastructure in at-risk areas, there is no one single solution to improving resilience overall or providing complete resilience against mass national emergencies.
To improve the resilience of telecommunications networks in at-risk areas, operators and governments need to find ways to work around power failures.
In this regard it will be important for the telecommunications and energy sectors to continue to work together to improve the resilience of their respective networks. We note that the energy sector and telecommunications sector have already put in place a memorandum of understanding to further improve cooperation.38