The Government has been criticised for this being a slow response. The realities are that the Communications Minister struggles to get any space on the legislative agenda, which includes the time of Parliamentary Counsel. As an example, the Bill to legislate a service provider registration scheme was introduced in August this year, it was included in the legislative priorities list (low priority) when Conroy was Minister. So this response is about ten times faster.
But what do we get for our buck here? Well clearly we get a Triple Zero Custodian. But that is mere smoke and mirrors because in the Bill we find that the Triple Zero Custodian will be the Secretary!
So there is no new function here. What we do get is a whole lot of extra powers given to the ACMA and a power for the Secretary to direct the ACMA in the exercise of those powers. Progressively the ACMA isn't an independent regulator charge to deliver outcomes, it is just an extension of the Department. Added to that is that since the Turnbull Government the old Department of Communications (under various names dating back to the Post-Master General in 1901) got merged into the Department of Infrastructure etc.
I worked with Richard Bean at Unwired. He is a sound lawyer. He was apponted to be Deputy Chair at the ACMA, but primarily on the strength of his background in television not communications. I admit I have not read his report on the 2023 Optus issue. I assumed, perhaps cuynically, that calling for the report was a classic case of the Minister needing to be seen to be doing something.
Now let's ask one simple question. How would any of the legislation have affected the latest issue?
If Optus is to be believed, and I have no reason not to, the short answer is 'probably not much'? The Triple Zero call failure came about because of a botched network upgrade in which the Optus employees did not follow the company's own procedures, which included testing Triple Zero.
No amount of extra reporting requirements, investigation powers, or other powers given to a group of people who do not and have not actually run a telecommunications carrier can change the simple fact of an employee not doing what they are supposed to. Well, actually more than one, because call centre staff failed to escalate complaint calls.
Enhanced monitoring at the 000 answering point to monitor traffic could, arguably, have identified a statistically anomolous drop-off in call volumes and further identified this as being from Optus mobiles. But this doesn't avoid the problem occurring and like all regulation winds up generating a false sense of security. Why should Optus bother making their test calls if the Triple Zero service will do it for them.
And what of the Minister's actions of calling in the CEOs of the three mobile carriers? What does this do other than blur in the public's minds exactly who is responsible. The Minister has, unwittingly, reduced the comparative reputational damage that Optus will suffer. The public hears 'all telcos suck' rather than 'Optus sucks.'
The Bill does nothing at all to increase the consequences for a carrier (or its employees) being negligent with respect to their Triple Zero obligations. A serious response would be to start introducing something like the points system for a driver's licence with the same potential consequences.
It doesn't help that well-meaning journalists pontificate on the idea that the Triple Zero service was built for 1960s phones and question whether it can cope with reality in 2025. The number was chosen in conjunction with the Community Telephone Plan in 1960 (see section 8). This plan introduced the dialling plan for direct dialling of national trunk (long distance) calls. '0' was the first digit dialled to get you out of the local exchange, and the ranges starting '00' and '01' were for service calls - other than '002' to '004' for Tasmania. The idea that the 000 number was chosen because it was easier to find the zero on the rotary dial is mentioned as only the third of the considerations in the choice of number in the ACMA's own history of the service.
So far we only know that there were deaths associated with failed calls, not whether the inability to reach Triple Zero contributed to that outcome. This was not the case back in 2002 in what was known as the Boulding case. That case revolved around a fixed line outage that meant the family could not call anyone when their child suffered a severe asthma attack.
The review found Telstra had not breached any of its universal service obligations, so the outcome was a whole new layer of regulation to create a categoty of priority customers for fault restoration. Policy makers and advocates need to remember that the entire cost of any new regulation falls on consumers, not telcos or their shareholders. If Government thinks they need to control the minutiae of telco operations, then renationalise the industry. If they are concerned about the operation of Triple Zero, take responsibility for the service rather than contracting it out.
Meanwhile all the blather about Triple Zero has been framed as preparation for summer and trying to guarantee that Australians can rely on the service through natural disasters. The reality, however, is that the greatest risk to connecting to anything from a mobile phone remains loss of power to base stations. The policy of encouraging tower sharing, especially in regional areas, means there isn't as much routing diversity as might at first seem.
The Triple Zero Custodian legislation seems to be the antithesis of the Government priority on growth through cutting red tape. It is a layer of new powers that would have made little to no difference in the Optus case and will make little or no difference in natural disasters. It is the epitome of a Minister needing to be seen to do something (in response to a feview commissioned by a Minister needing to be seen to do something).
Note: The emergency calling number designed into mobile network operations is 112. The ability to make calls to 112 over other carriers networks is a core part of the design standards. When the first digital mobile phones (GSM or 2G) were launched in Australia regulators made the decision to require the same functionality apply to 000 instead of educating Australians of the 112 code from mobiles. I suspect, but do not know, that calls to 112 from Optus mobiles would have successfully connected during the outage. Further note that the Telephone Numbering Plan 2025 shows the 112 code as being unused, in other words we could fully enable 112 as an alternate calling number on all networks.
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Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans JWL
Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans JWL
