Optus should be forced to accept outside technical help to restore public faith in the telco’s ability to manage triple-zero calls after two recent outages on its network, a consumer group says.
Scrutiny of embattled Optus has intensified after it apologised on Monday for 4500 customers in the NSW town of Dapto being unable to make emergency calls for eight hours on Sunday morning.
The revelation comes after the Singtel-owned company on September 18 suffered an outage that hit households in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and has been linked to three deaths.
That incident, subject to an Optus probe and a federal communications watchdog investigation, sparked expectations of a meeting between Communications Minister Anika Wells and Singtel executives, who are visiting Sydney this week from Singapore.
The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network wants Ms Wells to use licensing powers to mandate independent technical oversight of emergency and network reliability systems at Optus.
“This would provide some assurance that there is strict oversight preventing further failures,” network chief executive Carol Bennett said in a statement.
“The community must have confidence that the emergency call system works 100 per cent of the time when they most need it.”
Griffith University competition and retail expert Graeme Hughes said the best outcome from talks between Ms Wells and Singtel would be a “mandatory systemic overhaul guaranteed by the parent company’s resources and overseen by an external and impartial review board”.
“Optus’s second triple-zero service failure in less than two weeks illustrates that the current model has collapsed, pushing the issue into a state of dangerous systemic fragility,” associate professor Hughes told AAP.
“The localised September 28 Dapto outage confirmed the repeated failure of the fundamental ‘camp-on’ failsafe, endangering public safety.”
The camp-on mechanism is when a triple-zero call fails to connect from a phone user’s network and then is automatically routed through another provider.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue, under pressure to keep his job, has admitted regular processes were not followed on the September 18 outage, which occurred during a network firewall upgrade.
This month’s issues come after Optus in 2024 paid more than $12 million in penalties for breaching emergency call rules during a nationwide network outage a year earlier that caused significant disruption.
In the 2023 incident, Optus failed to provide emergency call access to 2145 people and subsequently did not conduct welfare checks on 369 people who tried to call triple zero, the communications watchdog found.
Mr Rue took over as the company’s chief executive in 2024 from Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who resigned after the nationwide outage.
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