Would a national authority change Triple Zero's reliability?

0:00Well, the big telco companies this week trawling through the recommendations of a Senate inquiry just called for sweeping changes to the triple zero system. The inquiry was launched after the massive Optus Network outage in September last year, which resulted in hundreds of calls failing to reach triple zero and two deaths. The inquiry made 11 recommendations, including the establishment of a nationalised authority to answer emergency calls. Yesterday, I spoke with the inquiry's chair, Senator Sarah Hansen Young. The triple zero call function, of course, back in the day before privatisation, was, of course, done by a government agency. And we think it's time to really consider bringing that back under independent control, so that the customer, the public, the safety is put first. It's not seen as some kind of chore or add on for a privately run company.

1:03That's Green Senator Sarah Hansen Young on breakfast yesterday. Luke Coleman is the CEO of the Australian Telecommunications Association, which is the peak body for the sector. And joins me this morning. Hi, Luke, welcome to the program. Good morning. Thanks for having me on. Is nationalising the triple zero system? Is it a good idea? It doesn't address the problems that we've seen over the last 12 months, because what we've seen occur in, when the Senate committee was writing this report, we've seen network outages. Optus had an outage on its network. It was not an outage of the triple zero service itself. Triple zero is effectively a call centre, which is operated by Telstra. It receives your call, and then it sends that call to the relevant state-based emergency service operator. That service has operated in exceeding all of its performance standards. It has not had an outage. So the idea of nationalising that service doesn't actually address the problems that we've seen over the last 12 months. They were network outages. So whether,

2:07whichever operator we're talking about here, when their network has a problem, your call was not able to get through to triple zero. That is a completely different technical problem to the triple zero service itself. It continued to operate 100% of the time. Telstra is contract with the Commonwealth government, has extremely high performance standards, which mean that calls need to be answered within a certain period of time and send over to the state-based emergency service operator within a certain period of time. It has exceeded all of those standards. So it's still the case, yes, there have been outages over the past year, and we should be looking at how we address those. But the solution that's been proposed here doesn't actually solve that problem. Would domestic roaming help to solve that problem that if one network is down, calls automatically go on to another? We already have a form of domestic roaming for the triple zero service. No matter which network you are on, if you have a network outage or if you're out of coverage

3:08range for your network, even if you haven't got credit on a prepaid card on your usual network, you will still be able to call triple zero. So it's a service called camp on. It is built into every mobile phone. So if you're a customer of one network, you're out of range or there's an outage, your phone will automatically scan for any other available network, and it will make that triple zero call through that process. So what, during some of these network outages have some people been unable to successfully get through to triple zero if that's the case? That is a really good question because that gets to the heart of the real problem here. It was a technical issue that certain phones were behaving differently when it comes to that camp on process. So let's have a think about how different triple zero is today. You've got three national mobile networks. You've got thousands of different kinds of mobile phones. Each of them running different software versions potentially. You've got the national broadband network. You've got satellite connectivity.

4:09There is a vast range of connectivity options. Compare that to when triple zero was introduced. Back in 1961, you had one national fixed line telephone operator, the postmaster general's department. You had no choice when it came to your phone. You were given a home telephone. You're not talking about 1961 before mobile phones and some were available. Again, the question, if this system in some ways is already in place, why were some people unable to get through to triple zero, particularly in this latest outage in September last year? So mobile phones are built to global specifications. What the industry has been doing since these outages have occurred. We've been testing mobile phones running thousands of tests and finding that that camp on process has not always behaved in a way that it should because those global specifications have not been drafted in a way that has a consistent way of a phone camping onto another network. So the industry has really led the charge here. We have globally led the charge to address these

5:11issues with global device standards. We are fixing them and we are making them more reliable. So that is a positive outcome to come from all of this. But ultimately, there is already a system in place called camp on, which should enable your phone to connect through to another network. Where there have been problems with that, there have been circumstances where those phones haven't connected through to another network. The industry is working to address those problems. You saw the sectors undertaken its own actions to ensure that triple zero is reliable. What other gaps are there in the system? So the issues that we've seen over the last year have ultimately been about network outages. So no network is going to be 100% or look proof 100% of the time. It doesn't matter if it's telecoms network and energy network or rail network, any network is going to have an outage at some point. But telcos are investing very heavily in network resilience to make sure that their networks are as reliable as possible. But there's also devices.

6:11They're an important part of the ecosystem. For most people you're attached to your smart phone, you use it everything from tapping onto the bus in the morning or paying for a coffee or making calls. Those devices, the Australian telcos have been working with the device suppliers to ensure that those specifications are as tight as possible to make sure that emergency calling is as reliable as possible. And that's been a collaborative effort and we are now engaged with global device specification bodies. That's called the 3GPP. They make global device specifications for emergency calling to improve the reliability of emergency calling globally. Not just in Australia. Now that is a long process that there is a long period in which you need to change those device standards. There are thousands of different devices and different software versions that need to be tightened up. But we're already getting some runs on the board to improve the reliability of emergency calling. Luke Coleman, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me on the program.