Efforts to beef up regulation of the telecommunications sector likely wouldn't have prevented last week's Optus outage, even if they were in force, according to experts who warn more significant changes are needed to avoid repeat catastrophes.

Instead they argue an investigation into the network's infrastructure and the addition of conditions into the telco's operating licence, along with stricter enforcement mechanisms, would go further to prevent serious outages.

The network failure, according to Optus's version of events, began early on Thursday morning but it was not reported to the communications regulator until more than 10 hours later.

More customers caught in triple-0 failure as Optus awaits 'consequences' Photo shows a woman with brown hair speaking in front of a blue and gr

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