Carol Bennett

speaker

86 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Carol Bennett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Briefing · Billions more poured into AUKUS + Telco outages can be avoided. Here’s how · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

And we know that there are commercial interests because Telstra has the biggest footprint.

It certainly has the biggest coverage and, you know, it certainly trades on the fact that it is the biggest network in Australia and we pay a premium for that.

But that doesn't mean that commercial interests should override the public interest in having access when we need it.

Well, the Telecommunications Act of 1997 stipulated that telcos should be self-regulated and that they shouldn't be burdened with regulation.

Now, that's out of step with the current circumstances where we find ourselves with everybody relying on their devices for everything they do from work to education to health services to accessing government services to our safety.

I mean, back in 1997, we had paid phones and landlines, so different world.

Unfortunately, we haven't improved that legislation over time to match the essentiality of connectivity for us.

So other sectors have got, especially where they're essential, like energy, water, those sorts of sectors that have been

a real importance to delivering to the community services that they really rely on to having built reliability standards.

And that puts in place a basic framework for ensuring that that maintenance, that reliability, the risk assessments, the asset management, the issues that must be in place and the performance indicators that would suggest the system is working in the public interest are there.

And at the moment, we don't have that.

We're completely reliant on the telcos to tell us if their systems are working and if it goes wrong, what's gone wrong, because there is not that kind of, you know, reporting and really fine tuning of the system that would occur if we had reliability standards in place.

Well, I think they will change the game.

They already are.

So what effectively will be in place in the next couple of years is satellite to device technology.

So you'll be able to, in the first instance, get satellite to device over voice technology.

The next level will be text and the next level after that will be data services.

So in 2027, there is legislation before the parliament called the Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation, which will bring in this capacity for satellite to device technology to operate in Australia.

And what that means is that anywhere you can get a signal or you can see the sky, basically, and there's a satellite because there is the capacity to have that kind of coverage, you will get coverage.

So that's really important in terms of addressing the geographical challenges in Australia.

Showing 41–60 of 86 · page 3 of 5