Sponsored by Optus
More of Australiaβs economy now depends on digital systems operating in real time. A card payment at a cafe, a hospital retrieving a patient record, a logistics company tracking its fleet and someone paying for a cab at three in the morning all depend on those systems working when they are needed.
Behind almost every digital interaction is a telecommunications network moving data between people, businesses, devices and applications. As cloud services, digital payments, AI, automation and online customer experiences become embedded in the way organisations operate, connectivity is increasingly becoming a critical piece of national infrastructure.
Chris Gilmore, senior director, enterprise business strategy at Optus, says that distinction has faded as businesses have become more dependent on digital systems.
βConnectivity is seen as important as power or water. Thatβs probably the biggest shift weβve seen in recent years,β Gilmore says.
βWeβve moved beyond a world where connectivity is just a utility. Today, the level of dependency is really determined by the importance of the services sitting on top of it.β
Infrastructure Australia (IA) has put telecommunications alongside transport, energy, water and social infrastructure in its assessment of what the nation needs to support a changing economy. IAβs 2026 Annual Budget Statement calls for βhigh-performing, resilient and technology-enabledβ infrastructure across those sectors.
The shift comes as Australia grapples with weak productivity growth. The Productivity Commission says labour productivity was flat in the June quarter and fell 0.2 per cent over the year, leaving overall productivity barely 1 per cent above its 2015β19 average.
Businesses are also adopting AI rapidly. Australian Bureau of Statistics data released in June shows 12 per cent of businesses used AI in 2024β25, compared with 1 per cent in 2022β23. More than a third of businesses said information and communications technology improved their responsiveness to customer needs.
That puts greater pressure on the infrastructure those businesses rely on.
From payments to patient care
Businesses large and small now rely on the same underlying infrastructure. A plumber taking bookings on a mobile phone and a florist accepting eftpos payments rely on the same broad communications infrastructure as banks, hospitals and national transport operators.
For larger organisations, the number of systems riding on those networks has multiplied. Transport and logistics companies use connected technologies to track assets and co-ordinate operations. Healthcare providers use networks to access patient information, transmit medical images, support remote monitoring and provide telehealth services.
Customers now contact businesses by phone, web chat, digital channels and AI-powered assistants, placing another layer of business activity on the underlying network.
Asked how much of Australiaβs economic activity now relies on telecommunications, Gilmore says: βThe short answer is β almost everything.
βDigitisation has helped transform almost every element of the Australian economy, and it all requires telecommunications to work.β
That dependence changes the consequences when connections are disrupted. An outage can stop payments, interrupt customer interactions, delay deliveries or restrict access to essential information and services. While no network is infallible, organisations can reduce the impact of disruptions by building resilience into their operations, including backup connectivity, contingency planning and clear business continuity processes.
Reliability, security, availability and continuity are therefore becoming business considerations rather than purely technical ones. Gilmore says organisations are responding by treating network design as part of business continuity rather than focusing primarily on bandwidth and uptime. Network diversity, redundancy and mobile backup can help maintain services if a primary connection is disrupted.
βResilience is no longer just about having a backup network in place but about designing networks and systems that can respond dynamically to changing conditions, maintain performance and keep critical services available,β he says.
Networks that respond
AI, automation, robotics and machine-to-machine communication are creating different demands on networks. For example, remotely operated machinery may need to respond almost instantly to an operatorβs instructions, while an AI-enabled camera may need to transmit large volumes of video.
Not all digital services have the same requirements. A brief delay in a social media upload may have little impact, while a similar disruption to payment systems or essential communications services could have significant consequences. As a result, some services require higher levels of resilience and continuity planning than others.
Paul Milford, executive general manager, networks transformation and AI operations at Optus, says networks will need to become more intelligent, secure and programmable as those demands grow.
βThe shift I see is from a network that simply carries traffic to one that can increasingly understand the requirements of the services running across it and adapt accordingly,β Milford says.
AI could also change the way telecommunications networks are operated. Network operations have traditionally been reactive: an alarm is generated, engineers investigate what happened and action follows.
Modern networks produce enormous volumes of operational data. AI can correlate information from different parts of a network and identify patterns that would be difficult for engineers to detect at the same speed and scale.
Milford describes the progression as moving from reactive operations to proactive and predictive systems, with greater autonomy possible within controlled boundaries. A network could detect signs of degradation, identify which services may be affected and recommend corrective action before customers experience a disruption.
βUltimately, the objective isnβt simply to fix network issues. It is increasingly to identify and resolve conditions before customers experience a disruption at all,β Milford says.
That does not remove engineers from the process. Milford says human accountability, engineering judgment and operational controls remain essential, particularly as automated systems gain the ability to reconfigure parts of a network.
AI can also change the threat environment. The technology can help defenders identify abnormal behaviour and respond to cyber threats more quickly, while giving attackers tools to find vulnerabilities and operate at greater speed and scale.
Different services, different needs
The development of 5G Standalone, a more advanced form of 5G, gives mobile networks greater ability to adapt to the needs of different customers and applications.
One emerging capability, known as network slicing, allows a single network to support different services in different ways. This means time-critical activities, such as essential communications services, can receive a different level of performance and priority than less urgent activities, such as uploading a video.
At a crowded stadium, tens of thousands of spectators may be uploading videos to social media at the same time that merchants are processing payments, venue operators are running systems and critical communications are taking place, Milford says.
A delayed social media upload is an inconvenience. A payment system or operational service may have a much lower tolerance for congestion.
βNot every service needs the same thing from a network,β Milford says. βA consumer streaming video, a payment terminal, an industrial control system and a critical communications service may all be using the same physical network, but their requirements for capacity, latency, priority, resilience and security can be very different.β
Network slicing offers a way to distinguish between those requirements. Network APIs, which turn the telecom network into a programmable business platform, could allow applications to request particular network characteristics when required.
Resources, agriculture, transport, logistics, healthcare and advanced manufacturing can operate across large distances and depend on reliable real-time communications.
At a mine, autonomous haul trucks, drones, cameras and remote-control systems could require different combinations of low latency, uplink capacity and priority. A programmable network could allocate resources according to the needs of each application rather than providing the same service to all of them.
Building resilience into the network
More automated networks will also have to deal with equipment faults, software problems, human error and cyberattacks without allowing a local problem to spread across other services.
Milford says network monitoring will need to identify not only whether a piece of equipment is working but what depends on it. If a problem occurs, the network may need to identify affected services, redirect traffic, isolate compromised systems or initiate recovery.
βResilience is not about assuming complex technology will never fail. Failures will occur,β Milford says.
βThe objective is to design networks so that when something does fail β whether through equipment failure, software failure, human error or malicious activity β we can detect it, understand its impact, contain it, recover from it and learn from it, while preventing a single failure from cascading into a much larger service disruption.β
For businesses, the immediate issue is that more transactions, customer interactions, automated processes and essential services depend on digital systems, while tolerance for disruption is shrinking.
The challenge for business leaders is no longer whether they invest in connectivity, but whether the digital foundations beneath their organisation are resilient enough to support the next wave of AI, automation and innovation. In a real-time economy, competitive advantage increasingly belongs to organisations that can operate securely, continuously and at scale.
The resilience gap
Many Australian organisations have invested heavily in cloud, data, automation and digital transformation initiatives over the past decade. But those investments are only as effective as the infrastructure that supports them.
As AI capabilities mature and customer expectations continue to rise, organisations are becoming increasingly dependent on always-on, secure and adaptable connectivity.
βMany organisations have invested significantly in digital transformation, but the conversation is now shifting from innovation alone to resilience,β Gilmore says.
βThe question business leaders need to ask is whether the infrastructure underpinning their cloud, data and AI investments is ready to support the next phase of growth. In a real-time economy, resilience becomes a competitive advantage.β
As Australia enters its next phase of productivity and economic growth, resilient digital infrastructure will play an increasingly critical role.
For business leaders, the network is no longer simply an operational requirement. It is a strategic enabler of innovation, customer experience, resilience and growth.
Organisations that proactively assess the resilience, security and scalability of their digital foundations today will be better positioned to embrace emerging technologies tomorrow.
Learn how Optus is helping Australian organisations build resilient digital foundations for whatβs next at https://www.optus.com.au/everynext
