Labor’s only announcement today is that they may conduct a review to create a plan, which might lead to a policy.
Madeleine Ogilvie is being mischievous by trying to recast a commercial decision by a single carrier as a failure of telecommunications infrastructure. Labor’s game playing is not in the interest of the many hundreds of Tasmanian businesses which use that infrastructure on a daily basis representing the state nationally and internationally.
Labor are out of their depth on telecommunications and completely confused about Basslink. As everyone except Labor now understands, the slow internet speeds experienced by customers of some ISPs last month was due entirely to a commercial decision made by TPG to not purchase enough capacity in advance of the planned outage.
The Government acted immediately and urged TPG to address the issue of capacity, and at the same time talked with Telstra to reinforce their efforts to get that capacity online as soon as possible. That was done, sufficient capacity is in place and there have been no notable issues since.
Other Basslink users such as AARNET and the State Government transitioned from Basslink without issue. If anything this demonstrates the resilience of the current infrastructure and the professionalism and strategic planning of the Tasmanian Government IT sector.
Ms Ogilvie’s politically motivated views are at odds with the industry peak body TasICT; CEO Will Kestin said at the time : “The Government’s response to this has been completely appropriate”, and “Michael Ferguson has been on top of this and I feel – and the industry feels – that he has done a good job.”
