The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) welcomes the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee’s report into Triple Zero service outages and its recommendations to strengthen the reliability, accountability and resilience of Australia’s emergency communications system.
The TIO particularly welcomes the Committee’s call to modernise telco legislation and recognise Triple Zero as an essential public safety service. This recommendation is an opportunity to ensure Australia’s telecommunications laws reflect community expectations.
The TIO supports improved transparency and reporting of outages across the Triple Zero ecosystem. Regular reporting of outage data will support transparency and community confidence in the Triple Zero ecosystem.
The Committee’s focus on stronger consumer safeguards and reliable access to Triple Zero is also welcome, including recommendations for a public register of Triple Zero-compatible mobile devices and greater information sharing between mobile network operators and device manufacturers.
The TIO supports the intention behind the recommendation for an automatic compensation scheme, but a fair and comprehensive framework needs to support compensation that reflects individual consumer impacts. There should be a requirement for flexibility to award over the automatic amount where it falls short for more significant impacts.
Quotes attributable to Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert:
“The events examined by this inquiry show why we need to prevent consumer harm, not simply respond after something has gone wrong.”
“Consumers don't judge an outage by the technical cause. They judge it by the support they did or did not get after the outage ended. When a telco’s response doesn't match the impact, trust is quickly lost.”
“The next step is turning these lessons into practical reform that improves reliability, strengthens accountability and rebuilds trust. The TIO will continue to bring the experience of consumers to this work and contribute to a telecommunications system Australians can depend on.”
ENDS