Proposed public register of telecommunications outages

ACCAN recently submitted to the Australian Communications and Media Authority on the draft Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard Variation 2026 (No. 1) which will establish online registers of telecommunication outages. 

The submission recommends the Australian Communications and Media Authority: 

1. Draft the following amendments to the proposed Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard Variation 2026 (No. 1) to establish standardised outage registers: 

2. Specify suburbs, towns and postcodes as the geographical reporting unit. 

3. Remove drafting that provides undue discretion to carriers and carriage service providers. 

4. Standardise reporting of outage information in line with the data at Table 1. 

5. Standardise the presentation of outage information in line with the example at Appendix A. 

6. Ensure outage registers are searchable by geographic location, filterable by data field, and mobile-friendly. 

7. Apply link prominence requirements to carriage service providers and carriers that act as carriage service providers. 

8. Ensure regular updates to outage registers, at minimum, once every 2 hours for the first 24-hour period following an outage, and twice during each subsequent 24-hour period. 

9. Update existing requirements in the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024 to reflect community expectations and needs: 

10. Amend the definition of a ‘significant local outage’ to lower the thresholds for impact services and duration and remove location-specific qualifiers. 

11. Remove exemptions for outages caused by natural disasters. 

12. Include communication requirements for planned outages. 

13. Make a record-keeping rule to capture outage and network performance data, in line with similar requirements in the energy sector.