Optus has paid a $12m fine over its mobile network outage last year that resulted in more than 2,000 people being unable to make triple zero calls.
One year ago on Friday, a routine software upgrade to Optus’s mobile network brought down the service for 14 hours across the country for the company’s 10 million customers.
While telecommunications providers have systems in place that when one mobile network is down, another network can connect the calls to triple zero, during the course of the Optus outage 2,145 people were unable to get through.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma), announced on Thursday that Optus had paid $12m for breaching emergency call rules for the failure to hand over emergency calls, and for a failure to conduct a welfare check on 369 of the people who had tried to make a call during the outage.
The Acma chair, Nerida O’Loughlin, said the regulator’s investigation had found that Optus failed in the management of its network in a number of areas and the outage should have been preventable.
After a government-commissioned review separate to Acma’s investigation, the regulator was directed by the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, to develop new industry standards and to update the emergency call service determination to improve the resilience of triple zero. Telcos are now required to check that mobile phones connected to their network can access triple zero.
“Beyond the penalties announced today by the Acma, the Optus outage has directly led to changes for industry regulatory obligations in relation to emergency call services,” O’Loughlin said.
“This will require further actions and investment by telcos, including Optus, to provide better safeguards for consumers and enhance the triple zero ecosystem so that Australians can have even greater confidence they will be able to get through to emergency services when they need it.”
State government departments and agencies are also working with the federal government to incorporate redundancy options in their telecommunications systems to ensure continuation of critical services should there be future network outages.
An Optus spokesperson said the company knows it let down customers and it is committed to addressing all lessons from the outage.
“In the past 12 months, Optus has conducted a review of its systems and processes, and we have made important changes to better manage emergency calls during network challenges, the spokesperson said.
“The Optus customer team has also been talking to customers who were impacted about their specific situations and our specialised team is available to offer any appropriate additional support.”
The company said it invests $1bn in network maintenance and upgrades, and will cooperate with the regulators and government on the new industry standards.
Just prior to the shutdown of the Optus and Telstra 3G networks last month, the government issued a new determination requiring mobile network companies to block phones that the carriers say cannot make triple zero calls over 4G or 5G. Acma has estimated this would block over 250,000 devices that were in use at the start of November, compared to the 30m phones in Australia in total.
