While the scale of Spain’s outage was unlike anything the country has experienced before, increasing extreme weather events are prompting governments to focus more on the resilience of telecoms networks.

In Norway, operators must fund battery backup of two hours in cities and four hours in rural areas. Australia has introduced publicly funded grants for operators to provide 12 hours of battery backup to sites in some remote areas.

The causes of the Spanish blackout remain undetermined but its scale was likely to be “a clarion call for government and regulators to pay attention to resilience,” said Grace Nelson, an analyst at Assembly Research, a UK based research company.