Optus’s triple-zero outage has opened the door for Australia’s biggest mobile services provider, Telstra, to charge even higher prices as customers flee its main rival, analysis of past crises shows.
The damaging September outage is Optus’s third major operational issue in recent years, creating a series of “churn events” that have prompted customers to consider changing telcos.
The company – which is facing calls for an inquiry after several deaths were recorded during the outage – also suffered a widespread network failure in 2023 and major data breach in 2022. The deaths of two people in South Australia and one in Western Australia have been linked to the September outages (a fourth death – an infant in SA – was found likely to have been unrelated).
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
During that period, Telstra recorded strong growth in retail customer numbers and bumped up its prices.
Telstra’s popular SIM-only 50GB mobile phone plan now costs $70 a month, up more than 20% from 2022 levels, according to Canstar Blue analysis conducted for Guardian Australia.
The price of the equivalent Optus plan has increased by 12% to $55 over the same period, with the telco required to offer more competitive prices to retain customers. Optus also significantly boosted its data offer during that period.
Consumer advocate Joel Gibson says Telstra benefits from a combination of consumer inertia, strong regional network coverage, and the troubles facing Optus.
“Telstra doesn’t compete much on price these days,” Gibson says.
“A lot of people will just never change because they’re rusted on. Maybe they have other services with Telstra, and it’s treated as a bundle and they think it’s too hard to unscramble the egg.”
Package deals, introductory offers, network speeds and variable data allowances make it notoriously difficult to compare telco plans.
Rising prices
Before Optus’s string of problems, Telstra’s “basic” mobile plan was largely in line with its rival’s equivalent “small” plan. They are known as post-paid plans.
Telstra’s plan was more expensive than its rivals in 2022 but it offered 40GB of data, compared with Optus’s 30GB, making Telstra cheaper on a price-per-data comparison.
In the fallout of Optus’s high profile data breach and network failure, it held prices steady until 2024. When it did increase prices, they were modest and accompanied by large data increases.
Gibson says Optus has been competing “pretty hard” with Vodafone, keeping a lid on price rises.
Meanwhile, Telstra periodically boosted prices on its basic plan and recently hit the $70 a month mark, which is over $15 more than Optus’ and Vodafone’s equivalent plans.
A Telstra spokesperson said the telco’s priority is to “provide customers with access to Australia’s largest and most reliable mobile network”.
“Changing our prices helps us to invest more to improve our mobile network performance and experience as well as the reliability and security of our services while responding to increased data usage and [we] continue to ensure we have local support on hand,” the spokesperson said.
Telstra dominates the market with 41.6% of the wireless telecommunications sector, according to IBISWorld, followed by Singtel Optus (24.7%) and Vodafone Australia owner TPG Telecom (14.1%).
A Canstar Blue analysis shows that there are 50GB mobile plans on the market priced as low as $29 a month, well under half the cost of Telstra’s plan.
The major telcos do offer more competitive rates through their fully owned budget telcos. For example, Telstra owns Belong, which has a $35 a month plan for 40GB.
Guardian Australia analysis also found that Telstra’s retail user numbers jumped considerably during times of crisis at Optus, with the 2022-2024 period representing very strong growth, especially for post-paid handheld services.
In the 2024 financial year, it recorded 560,000 net new handheld customers “driven by more people choosing our network”.
Telstra said at the time it had recorded a “minor uptick” in customers because of the Optus problems, crediting customer growth to its “value proposition” and seasonal promotions.
Such strong growth in customer numbers would typically allow a company to increase prices at a faster pace than usual. The equivalent customer dataset at Optus is not public.
The new crisis at Optus will benefit Telstra, says Anna Milne, a Wilson Asset Management equity analyst.
“Historically, outages have caused churn events for networks as customers prioritise reliability,” Milne says.
“This is a net positive for the likes of Telstra and TPG.”
