Aging infrastructure?

There had been a bit of wind overnight, which came to mind when neither our phone nor internet was working in the morning.   Yes, Optus was "down" again (it also happened a few months back).   After years of good service,  reliability seems to have taken a tumble.

Is that a loose wire up there?

In fact, one of our neighbours who is also on Optus told us that  the failure had occurred the previous evening.

I can't help thinking that the Optus cable, up there with the power lines, must be getting to the end of its useful life.   I know that they've sold it to NBN for a lot of money.    I have to say that I wonder whether NBN (and hence, we the taxpayers) are getting value for the many hundreds of millions of dollars reported to be involved.