Storms, floods and rising digital demand in 2025 exposed a growing risk for utilities: they may be resilient individually, but increasingly dependent on each other, which introduces fragility.
Two major storm systems hit New South Wales in mid-January 2025, cutting power to more than 300,000 homes and businesses at the height of the outages and left thousands without supply for days. Restoration required large-scale coordination between energy networks, emergency services, contractors and control rooms operating under damaged conditions.
Media briefings focused on physical restoration. But behind the scenes, the challenge wasn’t just trucks, poles, wires and logistics – it was also comms links, which depend on available power and working backhaul.
For utilities, the storms delivered a reminder that asset strength matters, but interdependence on other systems is equally critical.
Digital dependence
Utilities once treated telecommunications as a support service. If a link failed, water still flowed and power could still be dispatched manually. That assumption no longer holds.
Industrial control systems, remote telemetry and safety platforms are now engineered around continuous connectivity. When comms fails, operations do not necessarily degrade gracefully.
As utilities automate more operations remotely – unmanned substations, remote valve control, automated load balancing – communications infrastructure can shift from support service to operational control plane. The more that is automated, the greater the overall reliance on resilient connectivity.
AI is accelerating this shift. Utilities are deploying AI for predictive maintenance, real-time grid balancing and digital twins – virtual replicas of physical assets used to model performance and anticipate failures. These applications increasingly run at the network edge, close to remote assets where conditions are harshest and redundancy hardest to engineer.
Vocus head of digital solutions & innovation Greg Phillips said the shift has been gradual but profound.
“Utilities see the benefits of digital operations, and that brings a critical need for resilient digital infrastructure,” Phillips said. “When connectivity drops out, it can be a real risk to operations.”
Resilience by design
A national review of major incidents across 2024–25 found disasters now routinely impact energy, communications and emergency services simultaneously, with cascading effects across sectors.
Engineered redundancy remains important, but its limits are becoming clearer. Backup systems often share the same corridors, technologies or power sources as primary assets. When conditions deteriorate, those shared dependencies can fail together.
“A backup only helps if it fails differently,” Phillips said. “Redundancy for individual systems doesn’t deliver community-wide resilience in practice. Designing for diversity requires deliberate engineering, not just additional connections.”
The requirement for high availability can lead to complex design choices. Fibre is highly reliable but may not be economical for remote locations. Microwave wireless may be less costly but affected by weather and terrain. Private mobile networks deliver excellent coverage and performance but depend on licensed radio spectrum. Satellite offers national reach but still requires ground power. Resilience emerges from using the right mix for each use case.
Shared critical infrastructure
There is a further dimension utilities are now confronting. As operational technology environments converge with IT networks, the security of communications infrastructure has become inseparable from the security of the utility itself.
“The organisations making the best progress look beyond their corporate perimeter,” Phillips said. “They’re designing for how systems behave together – including communications, security and edge infrastructure – not just how individual assets perform.”
For Australia’s utilities, 2025 made one thing clear. Resilience is no longer built asset by asset. It is built or lost in the spaces where systems intersect.
“As utilities push more intelligence and automation to the edge, the communications layer becomes part of the operational fabric.
Vocus designs and secures our infrastructure with that reality in mind – not as a supplier sitting outside the fence, but as part of the same critical ecosystem.”
For more information, visit www.vocus.com.au
This article appears in the March/April 2026 edition of Utility. Subscribe HERE.
