The Albanese Government will commence important reforms to improve the Emergency Call Service, as part of its official response to the review into last year’s Optus outage released today.
The outage left millions of Australians and small businesses without access to communications services, and left many unable to call Triple Zero, putting lives at risk.
The Post Incident Review – announced the day after the outage and led by Mr Richard Bean – is the first comprehensive review of the Triple Zero ecosystem in over a decade.
The principal cause of Triple Zero issues during the outage was a lack of wilting on the Optus 3G network, whereby signals are powered down in order to enable calls to be carried by another network.
While Optus has advised this issue is now addressed, the outage identified a broader need to improve information flows, governance, and technical assurance frameworks in the emergency calling context.
The Australian Government will implement all 18 of the recommendations from the Review, providing a pathway to help reduce the impact of future outages on Australians.
Over the next 12-18 months, the Government will:
- Establish the Triple Zero Custodian framework, initially led by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO), to improve industry accountability and end-to-end oversight of Triple Zero;
- Implement new rules mandating how, what and when telecommunications carriers communicate with their customers during and after a major outage;
- Require industry to provide work plans to the regulator following a major outage, to explain how an impacted telco will mitigate the risk of a similar outage in future;
- Create a new comprehensive testing regime across telecommunications networks and telecommunications devices for calls to Triple Zero; and
- A review and update of legislation and regulation relating to the delivery of Triple Zero.
Collectively, these measures will improve industry accountability and the effectiveness of regulatory oversight and other supporting processes.
Consultation during the Review involved a range of stakeholders, including communications providers, Commonwealth, state and territory government entities, regulators, and industry and consumer representative bodies.
Separately, the independent regulator – Australian Communications and Media Authority – is undertaking an investigation into Optus’ compliance with the Emergency Call Determination 2019.
