Now, I've just given a brief overview of what it actually does, but can you give us a bit more detailed information on what temporary disaster roaming is?

So this is an industry agreement where...

the telcos will keep each other informed if there's an outage related to an emergency such as a fire or flood or earthquake.

And say, for example, I'm on Optus and there's an emergency and the towers go down in the area that I'm in, then what happens is that Optus will contact Vodafone and Telstra and say, look, our network's failed.

Can you take over the roaming? And so Telstra and Vodafone would turn their infrastructure on for Optus customers.

And so what that would mean is that for a short period of time on the Optus device, you would see emergency calls only written at the top, and then you would get a new message which told you that you were roaming.

And so if you look closely enough and had eyes that were good enough, you would be able to see that it says at the top that you're roaming.

Yeah.

desk

workers who are going to be looking at information and trying to correlate with the people that live in the area.

What are their normal activities in the area and looking for anomalies.

And there will be people that would be doing computer processing of the data to look, you know, to use scripts and other techniques to manipulate the data to look for anomalies and discrepancies.

And one example of what they might be doing is they might be looking at the situation where that young lady was attacked in the area about a year ago and trying to use that information from a year ago and correlate with what happened this time.

to see if there's outcomes where you might have a device appear in that area only on those two days or near those two events.

And that then would make that device one that was of interest to police.

And am I right in saying everybody's mobile phone these days is attached to them for the most part? You need a license to get a mobile phone, you need to prove your identity and every phone has its own serial number if you like, an IME number.

So talk a little bit about how that developed and what services you're providing for the districts.

Yeah, so originally our member school districts in our region, and this is, I'm on the western slope of Colorado, so it's a square.

We're on the west side, and we service Plateau Valley to Beck along I-70 to Glenwood Springs, and then you head south all the way to Aspen, so a very diverse group.

But the member school districts came to the BOCES, already having connection with us through professional development and then exceptional student services.

and asked us if there's any way we could help them come up with a CTE innovation center, like a central campus where they could house programs and then send kids like in an afternoon kind of thing from all the districts.

Well, the cost of land in this area made that very difficult.

And then obviously the travel time, none of the districts really wanted to be on the far edge of where that kind of building would be placed.

What questions has this provoked for you, Mark, listening to Jeff?

What did you make of Telstra's results today?

Well, I think that most people will find Telstra's results to be quite obscene at a time when Australians are doing it tough.

You know, one of the major factors that Australians are doing it tough is the high inflation.

And as we've heard from the Reserve Bank, the high inflation is being driven by companies increasing the prices for products and services, and Telstra has done that.

And for then Telstra to announce a $2.4 billion profit and to increase the CEO's salary by 11%, when most Australians are hopeful of getting a 1% or a 2% salary increase, It just, you know, as we say, it just does not pass the pub test.

And the government is just simply not listening.

You know, Telstra is crying poor.

They reckon they've lost barely any customers.

Mm

...which also impacted triple zero.

Um, I think that, uh, we'll all be looking at this court case very closely because it is the first time it will be in court.

Um, we would hope that the court doesn't look at it in that light, but looks at it in the light that we're talking about an industry which is a recalcitrant body, um, that it is, you know, that it has form, um, that, you know, major outages are the norm, uh, and that the court needs to take strong action.

So I'm, I'm-- I've got my fingers and toes crossed that the, um, that the impact will be north of a hundred and fifty million dollars.

I would like to see it as close to the maximum penalty as possible, but I, I do understand the courts may not go there.

We're gonna discount bills for a period of time."

Oh, most certainly.

What about other countries, other jurisdictions? Do they have domestic mobile roaming as a, as a feature in their telco networks?

Yes, they do.

We're seeing, um, countries around the world turn more and more to domestic mobile roaming because it improves competition.

It also improves the performance of the network, uh, the ability of people to connect, and also the performance of, you know, what they connect to.

So comparable countries to Australia that we're all familiar with, Canada and New Zealand, they've had domestic roaming for more than a decade.

Um, in both those countries, domestic roaming is seen to be a successful, positive way forward.

Um, suggestions by Telstra that domestic roaming would see the end of spending on new infrastructure is completely false.

What about the federal government? What have they said? Will they support domestic mobile roaming, particularly in the wake of last week's widespread Telstra outage?

Is it possible to have a mobile phone network that never goes down or never goes offline?

To say that we should have a mobile network that never goes down is difficult.

there are always things that may go wrong.

However, is it possible to have a mobile network where faults are contained into small parts of the network? Excuse me.

Sorry about that.

Yes, that is possible.

And the types of faults that we've been seeing in the past couple of decades should not have occurred.

In 60 seconds or so, can you explain to me what you would be doing as an engineer with the knowledge that you've got, should there be an outage, to make sure that you can remain connected in some way, should you need to?

How hard would it be, Mark, in order for these trains to have gone on to another service yesterday, to have a SIM card where they could automatically switch over to an Optus network or a Vodafone network and therefore have continued running? I think it's the fact that the entire network came to a grinding halt yesterday afternoon, and the fact that it couldn't get back up until early this afternoon is what has left a lot of Victorians quite frustrated.

Oh, most certainly, and...

To have the option for two SIM cards, a lot of equipment and systems that we utilise today has that.

The problem is that a lot of the train equipment is coming from other countries and in those countries they've only put in one SIM card into the equipment.

So Australia would have to make a special request.

for a second SIM card to be able to be put in this equipment.

Now, that's not such a hard thing to ask because nowadays we don't put a physical SIM card into the devices.

How does it stand up against other Western nations?

Annoying.

Very annoying.

And so...

Everything digital works on the basis of time.

And so we have what we call time synchronisation subsystems.

And the purpose of these is that as your phone call goes into the network, along with tens of thousands of other phone calls every minute, your phone call is routed to a number of subsystems, the authentication subsystem, the billing subsystem, the connectivity subsystems and transit subsystems.

And so they all work on the basis of time and your message or your connection has to get to these different subsystems within certain amounts of time.

Is it bad management? You know, how concerning is this from a network reliability perspective? Surely there should be safeguards or backups or redundancies in these systems that would prevent such a widespread disruption.