Resilience in Telecommunications

This case study is using two focal areas to demonstrate how to build resilience in telecommunications infrastructure and systems in the face of increasing bushfire and storm risk, and to investigate the financing and governance options to support this.

Increasing the resilience of mobile telecommunications requires an improved collective understanding between owners, operators and governments regarding the vulnerability of our assets and communication systems to key natural hazards, and what combination of actions can be taken to mitigate risk. This includes clarifying which interventions are most efficient to avoid damage and outages, who is responsible and how best to finance action.

CSIRO, Value Advisory Partners, Climate-KIC Australia and Aurecon are working with the telecommunications and energy sectors and government to explore the consequences of disruption during and post hazard events for customers and other indirect service users. We are identifying opportunities to create value through bundled packages of interventions that enhance place-based outcomes for communities and businesses, with a particular focus on remote and regional areas.

The project will begin to build technical modelling capabilities and governance capability in disaster resilience and management of risk. It will co-develop investment cases for two priority focal areas supported by decision making tools, models of outage consequence and methods for investment case development.