Telco service transparency on its way through outage register

Australia’s peak consumer body ACCAN has welcomed the announcement by Minister for Communications Anika Wells that public outage registers will be established in the wake of successive network failures.

Once implemented by sector regulator the Australian Communications and Media Authority, it will be mandatory for telcos to maintain a public outage register and update it in real-time.

ACCAN published a policy paper a fortnight ago calling for the establishment of a consolidated, national register for telecommunications outages.

ACCAN CEO Carol Bennett thanked the Minister for listening and acting in response to calls from the community, ACCAN and others, to inform consumers where and when telco outages occur and ensure a transparent public register of outages.

“Confidence in Triple Zero and telco services overall has taken a significant hit over recent times. This register is so important to stabilise community concerns.”

“Information about even the most impactful of outages is inconsistently spread across telco websites and social media pages, but all too often these communications are unreliable, and consumers are forced to turn to updates from third party media and social media forums.”

“It is vital that the outage register is searchable, current and transparent. Ideally we would also prefer a centralised database to one which varies across providers. This would mean that customers with multiple providers do not need to jump between different registers to access the information about their services that they need.”

“We thank the Minister for taking action on this important issue.”

As we have previously outlined, we anticipate this measure can be quickly implemented, with minimal additional compliance costs for the industry, but important accountability obligations” Ms Bennett concluded.

ACCAN looks forward to working with the regulator and industry on the creation and implementation of the new outages register.