The compensation bill for Telstra’s big outage in early July, which Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young claimed caused “mass chaos across the country”?
Less than $1 million in credits.
Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady, who delivered a full-year profit result bang in line with market expectations on Thursday, says the telco has fielded about 30,000 calls from affected retail customers, and will continue to work with enterprise and small business customers who were disrupted by the high-profile outage – which suggests that the compensation bill could increase.
But there has been no spike in customer churn since the outage.
Brady remains as apologetic as ever about the incident, which resulted in about $600,000 being lopped off her annual pay.
But it seems the reaction of customers has been much more reasonable and realistic than that of our point-scoring politicians.
The one little surprise in Telstra’s guidance was a $200 million increase in forecast capital expenditure – which now sits at $1.8 billion in 2027– as Telstra ramps up spending on its Aura terrestrial network, which will help underpin Australia’s artificial intelligence buildout.
Analysts were naturally nervous about the increase, and Telstra shares fell 4 per cent as the market digested the impact of inflation on the project.
But Brady remains confident that Aura, which is half built, can earn a return on investment in the mid-teens and pay for itself over about nine years.
And she’s particularly excited about the big jump in demand for Telstra’s digital infrastructure in the past six months, with Microsoft signing up as the foundational customer for Aura, and the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google and Firmus agreeing to long-term deals.
Telstra pressed the button on Aura in 2022, way back when the vast majority of investors hadn’t even heard of agentic AI.
Brady argues it is evidence of how quickly the world of technology is changing and how Telstra needs to think very long-term when it comes to investing.
We’d suggest it also shows how valuable Telstra’s infrastructure business, which was once slated for a spin-off from the core telco operations, has become.
Source:https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/what-we-learnt-you-ll-never-guess-telstra-s-outage-compo-cost-20260812-p60nl6