Hold the Phone, Committee Hits Optus Over Major Outage

Optus should have offered more comprehensive compensation to customers hit by a massive network outage last year, a Senate report says. The report released Sep. 27 says the telecommunications company’s offer of 200 gigabytes of data in compensation for the 12-hour outage on Nov. 8 was “disingenuous” because few of its customers were likely to make use of the additional data. Optus had considered a rebate for a day of lost service, but discarded that idea because it would have only amounted to $1 (US$0.69) or $2 (US$1.38). The Senate committee, chaired by Sarah-Hanson Young of the Greens, found the dollar figure might represent what Optus charged for its services, but not what the loss of the services represented to its customers....