Telcos forced to make network outages public in real time after Optus scandal

Telcos such as Optus and Telstra will be forced to keep a public register of any outages affecting their networks in real time as the Albanese government moves to improve Australians’ confidence in the Triple Zero system.

The real-time register is yet to be designed but could operate similarly to the way energy companies provide live information and maps about outages on their websites.

Minister for Communications Anika Wells arrives at question time this month.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Communications Minister Anika Wells wrote to the regulator on Monday with a formal direction that it must beef up transparency measures and require telcos to keep a public register of network outages.

Her instruction to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) comes after three people died when at least 600 Triple Zero calls failed in Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory during September’s Optus outage.

Eleven days later, almost 5000 Optus customers in the Illawarra region of NSW couldn’t contact emergency services for more than nine hours.

Real-time registers are the government’s latest attempt to rebuild trust in the emergency call system after the scandal rocked Australians’ confidence and put pressure on Wells, who described herself as a “new minister” and travelled to New York for a United Nations trip amid the fallout from the Optus outages.

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Wells this month introduced legislation to give the Triple Zero custodian within ACMA greater powers – a recommendation of a review that the government had accepted 18 months ago.

Other new rules will come into effect on November 1. Telcos will be required to update customers about local outages and provide information to ACMA and emergency services. Triple Zero services must be tested during network upgrades, and telcos must ensure Triple Zero calls can fall back onto other networks during outages.

But the new directive takes that a step further, by requiring telcos keep a real-time register of outages that is accessible to the public.

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“Triple Zero is a critical public safety system and Australians need confidence that it will be available when they need it,” Wells wrote in her letter to ACMA on Monday.

The minister said she would issue ACMA with a direction to amend the industry standard and “mandate that telecommunications providers maintain a public register of their network outages”.

“A public register of network outages will increase transparency and accountability around outages and related impacts on access to Triple Zero,” she wrote.

The opposition has targeted Wells over her handling of the Optus outage, which happened four months after she was promoted to communications minister following the May election.

Opposition communications spokeswoman Melissa McIntosh has called for an independent inquiry into the Triple Zero ecosystem, saying ACMA “cannot be the investigators” as it was part of the failed process in September.

Industry experts have said the system faces mounting pressures. According to Telstra internal data, calls to Triple Zero have surged by 44 per cent over the past decade, from 8.1 million in 2014 to 11.7 million in 2024.

With David Swan

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