[hugh3]

The power company is presumably already forking over a huge amount of money to Telstra every month for data. This one event would have been a spike, but not a crazy dominant one.

If you or I accidentally ran up $200K in charges due to somebody stealing our SIM then yes, we could probably negotiate it down. In a big-business-to-big-business context, though, Telstra is as likely as not to say "Hey look, that's what the contract says, you signed it, so suck it".

Without any information to the contrary, I'm willing to believe that if the court decided that the actual damages to the power company were $183,000, then the actual damages were $183,000.