Optus has been fined 12-million dollars after thousands of customers were unable to call triple zero during last year's unprecedented network outage.
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00:00Any Optus customer doesn't need reminding, so for millions of Australians they couldn't
00:07access phone or internet services and it caused chaos across the country basically and the
00:13outage lasted for up to 14 hours and it was significant.
00:18People couldn't do their work, they couldn't study, they couldn't call loved ones.
00:22Optus has been fined $12 million and that's because more than 2,100 customers couldn't
00:29call 000.
00:31Now during an outage 000 is meant to work anyway on other networks and that failed and
00:38also not only that, after the outage was over Optus has an obligation to do welfare checks
00:46on people who tried to call 000 and couldn't and the regulator has found that it failed
00:52to do so in more than 360 cases and we've interviewed people in this situation.
00:59We spoke to a Gold Coast cancer patient who was having a medical episode and said he couldn't
01:05call 000 for some time and he was seeking an ambulance and he also claimed that Optus
01:13did not contact him to conduct a welfare check.
01:16So these are the sorts of very serious situations that people were in and say Optus let them
01:22down.
01:23They say they've conducted an internal review and that has led to changes in processes and
01:29systems to deal with emergency calls during an outage.
01:34They also say they're working with the government, there was a great deal of hand wringing after
01:39the outage given its significance about whether regulation of the sector was up to scratch
01:46and the government commissioned a review and there was also a Senate inquiry and the
01:52review recommended that there be increased standards placed on telcos not only about
01:58the resilience of their networks to try and make it so these sort of major events are
02:04much less common but also around communication.
02:08People also will remember that Optus was very poor in its communication to the public
02:16and to government about what was going on on the day of the outage.
02:20They relied on social media updates largely in the early stages and very brief statements
02:28to the media and didn't do press conferences and there weren't a lot of interviews particularly
02:35in the first few hours of the day and it left the public and government really scrambling
02:41to understand what was happening and so there's going to be obligations placed on telcos about
02:47just how they communicate better with the public but also with government.
02:52The government's still working through those things but I think it taps into a much greater
02:57conversation that is being had now with consumer groups saying that they're really unhappy
03:03with the way telecommunications is regulated, they want more direct regulation in the sector
03:10and there's been some pushback from the sector on that saying that in some cases industry
03:16codes are acceptable and govern enough of this.
03:20So I think there's going to be continuously this push and pull as to whether in fact the
03:27public is protected adequately in the telecommunications sector.
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