Govt releases terms of reference for inquiry into outage
Customers left without phone and internet services during this month's nationwide Optus outage are being asked to have their say as part of a review.
Transcript
00:00 Well, one of the main focuses will be on the functioning of triple zero calls during the
00:06 outage.
00:07 As you said, the terms of reference for this inquiry have now been released, with the government
00:12 saying that it wants to uncover the lessons for both government and the telecommunications
00:17 industry from this incident.
00:19 Millions of customers were left without internet and phone access for up to 14 hours during
00:25 this outage earlier this month.
00:27 Optus says and has blamed a software upgrade for the disruptions and has also acknowledged
00:34 that around or more than 200 customers were unable to make emergency calls to triple zero
00:41 during those disruptions.
00:43 Australians are supposed to be able to make emergency calls even if their network is down
00:48 with phones automatically jumping to another network.
00:52 This review will look at whether that actually happened and if any regulatory or legislative
00:58 changes are needed to strengthen that.
01:02 The review will also, it should be noted, won't be looking into the technical cause
01:09 of the disruption and it also won't be looking into the adequacy of the value of compensation
01:15 that has been offered to customers by Optus.
01:19 The Communications Minister, Michelle Rowland, saying that the review will look more broadly
01:24 at customer complaints and compensation processes.
01:28 What's important here is the framework as a whole.
01:31 We have a number of industry standards, they are overseen by the regulator.
01:36 We want to ensure that the industry as a whole responds proactively in future.
01:42 We see what needs to be improved and we'll use this as an evidence base going forward
01:46 to do just that.
01:47 And that is the Communications Minister, Michelle Rowland, speaking earlier this morning.
01:52 The outcome of this review will be handed over to her in February.
01:56 [BLANK_AUDIO]