Optus rival Kogan rejoices as Aussies jump ship after outage

In the wake of yesterday's unprecedented, 14-hour Optus outage, telecommunication providers are reporting skyrocketing rates of frustrated Aussies switching providers, with one company registering a whopping 400 per cent increase in customers.

Optus's outage has had widespread ramifications, having shut down entire train networks and hospitals and, in one tragic incidence, a Sydney woman revealed she missed the death of her mother in hospital after not being able to be contacted.

After millions of Australians had their personal and extremely sensitive data stolen in last year’s cyber breach, the question on many customers’ lips now is: “Is this the straw that breaks the camel’s back?”

Competitors win after Optus's major outage

According to data from online retailer Kogan, the answer for many is "yes". Data recorded throughout yesterday alone revealed the company saw "400 per cent higher eSim sales than a normal day".

While the term eSim may not sound familiar right now, it might soon, with the new technology expected to completely replace the plastic SIM cards we've become accustomed to for the past two decades.

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Most new phones actually all support eSims — which are virtual sim cards — in addition to physical ones. It means people can jump on their phone and switch from Optus to another provider in literally a few minutes, and be up and running.

Previously, Aussies would have had to visit a store in person, queue up and buy a physical SIM, and then switch it out using a special SIM card pin.

eSims surge in popularity

While speaking about the massive uptake in Kogan mobile subscriptions, CEO Ruslan Kogan said making the switch to eSims could take just minutes.

"Kogan Mobile had a record day yesterday thanks to eSIMs, which now make it possible to switch mobile providers within minutes without getting off the couch," he said.

"I was in a meeting yesterday where someone was frustrated with the outage. I let them know about Kogan Mobile eSIMs and, 5 minutes later, they had ported their number across and were contactable again.

"eSIMs put the power back in the customers' hand and we love it."

Andrew Branson, CEO of sister telcos More and Tangerine, saw a similar jump in sales.

“Following yesterday's widespread outage, we have seen a sizable bump in sales across our mobile plans, with strong numbers signing up to our new eSIM offering," Branson said.

"eSIM allows customers to switch seamlessly and quickly without the need to collect a SIM from a store or wait for it to arrive in the mail. In today’s fast-paced world, we know that customers want affordable mobile options on a reliable network.

"For our mobile plans, we use the Telstra Wholesale Mobile Network, whose coverage area reaches more than 98.8 per cent of the Australian population.”

Meanwhile, Optus has ruled out compensation after the 14-hour outage brought much of Australia to a grinding halt yesterday. The "root cause" of the outage remains a mystery.

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin spent much of yesterday apologising for the chaos, which saw 10 million Australians, 400,000 businesses - including Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and ANZ - and much of the wider population feel the impact of mobile and broadband services going down.

But she said there wouldn't be payouts because most customers would get "less than $2" for their troubles.

There have been financial hits for Aussies who lost a day’s work, for business owners who couldn’t take payments, and general inconvenience as people couldn’t make calls, use public transport, or access key call centres.

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