Well-targeted regulation had an important role, but would not alone deliver the higher quality or resilient services that underpinned Australia's productivity, Telstra chairman Craig Dunn told a shareholders' meeting.
As an example, Mr Dunn cited calls for mandatory roaming, which would require mobile operators to offer service to other networks' customers when they moved outside their provider's footprint.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched a 12-month inquiry on the issue in August, with submissions due in November.
The goal is to improve service for Australians living in remote and rural areas, but Mr Dunn said it risked doing the opposite.
"Mandated roaming does not build a single new mobile tower or extend coverage into areas where no network exists today," he told the meeting in Sydney on Tuesday.
Telstra has spent $3.8 billion on its mobile network in regional and remote Australia over the past five years as part of a broader strategy that allows the telecommunications provider to differentiate on coverage.
Mandatory roaming risked slowing investment, Mr Dunn said.
"New regulation must be judged by the incentives it creates and not by the intentions behind it," he said.
The annual meeting took place against the lingering backdrop of a nationwide Telstra outage in July, which knocked out services for most of a day.
The company knew it had let customers down with the network failure, chief executive Vicki Brady told shareholders.
An external review by Technology Audit Partners found the disruption was primarily the result of Telstra not treating network timing as a critical capability requiring the highest level of oversight.
The outage began in the early hours of the morning after a planned change to a timing chassis in Melbourne triggered rolling network failures when an incorrect internal date was set.
Ownership for network timing issues wasn't sufficiently defined and there was insufficient technical expertise on hand to deal with the problem when it arose, the report found.
"We accept the findings, we've taken immediate steps to strengthen our network and that work continues," Ms Brady said.
"Our commitment is to use what we have learned to make our services even more resilient and reliable for our customers."
The outage sparked a Senate inquiry and an ongoing investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
In response, Telstra's board reduced Ms Brady's pay package by $607,000 for 2025/26, taking her total compensation to $6.8 million.
It also docked the short-term incentive pay of nine other senior executives by a total of $1.3 million.
Telstra received about 33,000 complaints or requests for redress as a result of the outage and 99 per cent had been dealt with at a cost of about $1 million, Mr Dunn said.
One shareholder said the company had been doing well before the outage and sounded sympathetic about what had happened.
"It's like you did enter the 400 metres of the Olympics and crossed the finish line to win gold and then tripped up and broke your leg," she said.
"It's a bit unfortunate."
Long-time Telstra investor Peter Stump faulted Mr Dunn for not appearing alongside chief financial officer Michael Ackland during the outage, which occurred while Ms Brady was away on holiday.
"Nobody's crucifying Vicki because she's entitled to have a bloody holiday, for God's sake," Mr Stump said.
"But you, as the chairman of this company, should have stepped up."
Telstra shares finished Tuesday down 0.2 per cent to $4.64.
All the resolutions put to the shareholders' meeting passed.
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