I’d suggest that nationalising the telco would have little bearing on resolving single points of failure in the network. There’s a cost to redundancy, and unless it’s built in very, very thoroughly, Murphy’s Law will still apply - and probably find the single point or combination that trips it up - and then what?. The cost is something they need to consider. Businesses may be willing to pay, depending on their needs. Consumers may not be willing or able to pay.
I ran a business unit that included several data centres, the majority being for disaster recovery. Some customers were happy to run without disaster recovery. Some ran their own data centres and were only willing to pay for a facility which could replicate their system, with testing every three months or even less frequently. Others had much higher availability needs with near zero data loss (synchronous mirrored storage with periodic shadowing of the backup) and short recovery time objectives. This requires dedicated fibre links with alternate data paths. It gets complex very quickly. And expensive. Unless you regularly test the cut over, there’s no guarantee the switchover will work.
The other challenge can be that some of the same people who are required to diagnose and resolve the system outage might be required to make the cut-over happen. I’m not saying it can’t be done, and I certainly don’t think the kind of outage Optus had is acceptable.
Nothing ought to prevent anyone from building in their own redundancy, per:
I keep a spare NBN modem, and run a UPS for my modem and computer. My NBN fibre modem has its own.
The other problem with having a national carrier is that there’s no market differentiation. I preferred the ISP market when there was much less consolidation. Service was better, and pricing was competitive. If you have access to pineapple.net, you’ll get much, much better access to fibre than if you’re on NBN FTTP - especially if you want off-site backup - NBN will give you at most 40 Mb upload; pineapple.net provides a duplex service with its slowest option at 150/150 Mb. They are unlikely to service the bush though. They’ll roll out in high density metro areas I suspect.
It’s easy for me now. I’m retired. I watched Maxwell’s bizarre batting performance, so I slept through the Optus outage. I must have missed a few scam callers though. Optus has offered 200 GB of data to its users. Amaysim (2nd tier Optus) has offered 60 GB from later in November through 31 December, non-accruing. I think they’re offering 6 weeks of “free talk and text” as well. We’d all prefer reliable service, but at least they understand that compensation is essential, given the circumstances.
IIRC, if you call 000 on your mobile, and your network is down, any other network will connect your call.
