Telecommunications infrastructure underpins essential services, economic activity and emergency response across regional Australia, making network resilience an important component of national preparedness. As climate-related disruptions become more frequent and communities grow increasingly dependent on digital connectivity, the consequences of an outage can spread across energy, healthcare, local government, business and emergency management systems. Assessing infrastructure as an interconnected network can help governments and operators identify where investment will provide the greatest resilience across the communities and services that depend on it.
When telecommunications fail during a disaster, the immediate concern is usually loss of signal. In regional communities, the consequences spread much further. Hospitals lose informal communication systems, businesses cannot process payments, council operators lose access to telemetry, social workers suspend home visits, and emergency responders have to work around an information gap at the same time that demand is increasing.
Speaking at the 2026 Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, Nic Mesic and Peter Heinmiller from Value Advisory Partners presented an 18-month project examining telecommunications resilience in East Gippsland in Victoria and Eurobodalla in New South Wales. Their work focused on bushfire risk and the relationship between mobile and fixed wireless networks, energy supply, emergency management and the regional communities that depend on them.
Understanding the true reach of telecommunications failure
The project began with the structure of the telecommunications network itself. Some towers operate independently, while others carry signals upstream and downstream through connected sites. When a hub fails, the impact can extend across every downstream tower and the communities within those coverage areas. Energy supply adds another layer of dependence because towers cannot continue operating indefinitely without power, while power restoration often depends on working communications.
Mesic explained that the study deliberately focused on two regional coastal locations that share common challenges around service access, isolation and emergency response. Both regions include communities where one road may provide the only practical way in or out, increasing the consequences when fire, infrastructure damage and telecommunications failure occur together.
Heinmiller said the assessment looked at both the risk created by disruption and the value that stronger telecommunications could create during normal operations. This broadened the analysis beyond the cost of restoring a tower or replacing damaged equipment. It allowed the project team to examine how communications support economic activity, health services, council operations and social connection before, during and after a disaster.
Stakeholder workshops revealed how deeply telecommunications had become embedded in ordinary service delivery. Hospital staff described relying on mobile phones as an informal internal communication network. Businesses depended on mobile point-of-sale systems. Council operators used telemetry to monitor and control sewerage equipment remotely. Social workers needed reliable voice and data services before they could safely visit clients at home.
The project translated these experiences into statements describing who could no longer perform a function, which service was affected and what consequence followed. That process helped the team understand the practical effects of an outage across different sectors rather than treating the loss of mobile coverage as a single technical failure.
Building the investment case for network-wide resilience
Economic modelling was then used to estimate the productivity impact of disruption. The team drew on Australian Bureau of Statistics data at local government level and considered how dependent each sector was on telecommunications, how much labour could be substituted during an outage and how connected tower sites influenced the scale of the disruption.
This approach recognised that the value of a tower cannot be understood solely through the number of customers directly connected to it. A site may support a small population while also carrying upstream or downstream traffic, enabling emergency communications or supporting services whose value extends far beyond the immediate coverage area.
Heinmiller said the next stage involved identifying possible interventions and assessing how well they would perform under different conditions. Options included hardening infrastructure, clearing vegetation around vulnerable tower sites, maintaining safe access roads, deploying mobile cells on wheels and strengthening community capacity to function during outages.
The team also considered whether an intervention addressed the asset, the surrounding environment, the service being delivered or the consequences of failure. The suitability of each option depended on local conditions, including whether a site was regional or remote, forested or built up, independently operated or part of a daisy-chained network.
Future scenarios were used to test whether the interventions would remain effective as climate risk and technology changed. Workshop participants generally believed the current position involved relatively infrequent disruption and limited sector-wide coordination, while the more likely future involved more frequent disruption without a corresponding improvement in coordination.
The preferred future was described as a managed crisis, where higher levels of disruption were met with stronger coordination across systems and targeted place-based investment in areas of greatest risk.
The resulting resilience investment case allowed interventions to be assessed individually and as part of a wider package. This distinction became important because the return on investment varied significantly between tower sites. Some sites generated little measurable value when assessed alone, while others produced a stronger benefit-to-cost result.
Viewed as a network, however, the calculation changed. A lower-value site could still play an important role in maintaining connectivity across a region, supporting a hub, creating redundancy or protecting access to emergency services. Investment decisions based only on individual asset performance could therefore weaken the resilience of the broader system.
“What makes sense for one site does not necessarily make sense for another,” Heinmiller explained. “When you look at the system as a whole, there can be considerable value in delivering interventions across a number of sites.”
Planning for the full value of resilience
The analysis also showed that the frequency and duration of future outages affect the strength of the investment case. An intervention may appear difficult to justify if it prevents one additional day of outage every five years. The value rises considerably when communities are facing an additional day of disruption every month.
That finding places climate risk and future service dependence at the centre of infrastructure planning. Investment decisions based only on historical outage patterns may underestimate the value of resilience as disruptions become more frequent and communities become more reliant on digital services.
The project identified the limits of purely quantitative analysis. Economic modelling can estimate productivity losses and some service impacts, but it cannot fully capture every consequence of a telecommunications failure. The effect on social cohesion, public confidence, emergency decision-making and vulnerable residents may be difficult to express as a single dollar value.
Qualitative evidence therefore remains an important part of the investment case. It helps decision-makers understand what has been measured, what remains outside the model and which consequences carry significance even when they cannot be fully quantified.
Mesic and Heinmiller also highlighted the need for collaborative investment across the public and private sectors. Telecommunications providers own and operate much of the infrastructure, while governments, councils, emergency services, energy companies and communities all depend on it. Their exposure to risk is shared, even when responsibility for individual assets is divided.
The interdependence between energy and telecommunications provides one of the clearest examples. Strengthening a tower without considering its power supply may produce limited resilience, while hardening energy infrastructure without protecting the communications needed to coordinate restoration leaves another point of failure.
The project therefore supports a place-based approach in which infrastructure, community capability and service dependencies are considered together. It also offers a framework that can be applied to other regional locations with similar risks.
Regional telecommunications resilience depends on understanding the network as a connected system rather than a collection of individual towers. Each site sits within a wider chain of energy, communications, emergency management and community services. Investment decisions that reflect those connections are more likely to preserve the functions people rely on when disruption spreads across the region.
