Telcos will be required to keep customers informed about crippling network outages via the internet, social media and news bulletins, under new industry standards being developed in the wake of the Optus outage.
Communications minister Michelle Rowland on Tuesday directed the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to develop enforceable industry standards for how telcos communicate with customers, starting the clock on a 12-month roll out.
The rules will establish a new regulatory expectation for communications that keep customers up to date during major outages and significant local outages.
It comes after widespread customer dissatisfaction with Optus over its 12-hour nation-wide outage that left millions of Australians without service and prevented thousands of emergency calls.
The government intervention stems from the 2023 Optus outage that led to 2,700 emergency calls failing to connect to a Triple Zero operator and
The Albanese government in April accepted all the recommendations from the post incident review it commissioned.
In its response, the government acknowledged Optus’ customers dissatisfaction with the companies communications, agreeing to the new standards and pledging to have them in place within 12 months of the drafting.
That drafting was announced on Tuesday, meaning the new regulatory expectation for customer communications should be in place sometime next year.
“The Optus outage on 8 November 2023 shone a light on systems and processes in the telecommunications ecosystem that are in critical need of reform,” Ms Rowland said. “The directions I have issued today will help improve how telcos communicate and engage with their customers in outage situations.
“Telecommunications services are essential for participation in modern life, and ensuring that systems and processes are working to support people during stressful outages is fundamental.”
When the Optus network went down last November core network routing was also lost, preventing engineers from triggering wilting procedures that make mobile phones attempting emergency calls to connect to alternative networks.
The government has also accepted recommendations to force telcos to ensure emergency calls are carried by other networks in the event of an outage and share real-time network data with a new co-ordination body.
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