Optus has apologised for a second triple-zero outage in as many weeks as failures to re-route calls through other networks are back in the spotlight.
The latest blackout – dubbed “unacceptable” by NSW Premier Chris Minns – is linked to a mobile phone tower in NSW that affected 4500 users in the Dapto area on Sunday between 3am and 12.20pm.
A review by the telco identified nine failed calls to triple zero, but Optus says those affected “are OK” and the issue has been rectified.
The NSW premier lambasted the failure in the Illawarra region as “clearly unacceptable.”
“NSW deserves full and transparent information from Optus about what went wrong yesterday, including when emergency services and the Telco Authority were notified,” Mr Minns said on Monday, referring to the state’s critical communications agency.
Police confirmed they received a request from Optus on Sunday morning to conduct welfare checks on a number of callers in the Dapto area who had attempted to contact triple zero and were unable to connect.
Optus has also reported one of the Dapto callers required an ambulance and used another phone to contact emergency services.
Another unable to reach emergency services have confirmed they “are OK”. Two calls were accidental and three were test calls.
Four welfare checks were referred to police but none required an emergency services response. Dapto is a southern suburb of Wollongong.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the government was holding the telco to account with a thorough investigation under way by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
“This can’t happen again. This is an absolutely shocking failure from Optus,” he told reporters on Monday.
The outage has also raised questions about the effectiveness of the camp-on mechanism, whereby if a triple-zero call fails to connect from the phone user’s network then it automatically is routed through another provider.
RMIT engineering academic Mark Gregory slammed Optus and other telcos for not investing necessary resources to deal with outages.
“They don’t want people to really see how bad their networks actually are,” he told AAP.
“The networks are less reliable than they should be and that is because of the lack of investment in the networks and the systems that run those networks.”
He said the technical details of what happened in Dapto must be shared with the public, suggesting other towers powered by Telstra or TPG were not in range of customers.
Dr Gregory noted the onus was also on the federal government to empower the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman to enforce regulations.
“The telcos have invested heavily in lobbying, and the moment the government is listening to the telcos and not to the regulators,” he said.
Asked about domestic roaming and camp-on solution, ACCC chair Gina Gottlieb told reporters on Monday the watchdog had in a 2023 report recommended switching calls between the carriers in emergencies.
Carriers at the time noted congestion on the surviving network and technical parameters were key issues for temporary domestic roaming.
The Dapto triple-zero failure is the latest in a hat-trick of outages for the besieged telco.
Nearly two years ago, Optus paid a $12 million fine after a technical issue left more than 2000 people unable to ring the emergency number.
On September 18, a more wide-ranging communications outage was linked to the deaths of three Australians.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue blamed human error for that fault, triggered by a scheduled firewall upgrade in South Australia.
Normal calls were largely unaffected but the outage blocked about 600 triple-zero calls from connecting to emergency services in South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and NSW.
The incidents have alarmed Communications Minister Anika Wells, who has requested discussions with representatives from Optus parent company Singtel, who are in Sydney this week.
Singtel’s share price dropped more than two per cent on Monday.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley criticised the prime minister for being in the UK while the “Optus crisis is getting worse here in Australia”.
“The entire triple-zero ecosystem needs an urgent inquiry, not just by the regulator, not just this tip-toeing around by the government,” she told reporters.
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