An inquiry has been launched into the fire at a Telstra exchange in Warrnambool, Victoria, which cut off the telco’s fixed line network to 60,000 residents.

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has opened tenders to operate, monitor and maintain satellite community phones in remote Indigenous communities.

The Federal Government has flagged a trial of in-house telemonitoring technology for chronically ill veterans via the National Broadband Network (NBN), kicking off in July 2012.

The Australian economy may not be large enough to warrant international vendors launching dedicated data centres to provide cloud services to the local and Asia Pacific markets, a senior federal government bureaucrat has warned.