CommsDay Story of the Week – from CommsDay, Friday 27 February 2026
We have chosen an article which reported the proceedings of the Senate Environment and Communications references Committee held yesterday (26 February) in which Stephen Rue, CEO, and other senior Optus personnel answered questions on what they have done to address Triple Zero issues since the major outages of previous years. Some of the matters discussed were specific to Optus and some affect the industry more broadly. We consider that the Optus responses indicate how that organisation is tackling issues, some of which are more complex than might have appeared at the time, and some of which involved procedures that had been adopted at the time.
Overall it appears that Optus, and the industry in general, are making good progress in completely revisiting systems and procedures to ensure that the Triple Zero service works as it should when it should. We note, as well, that in a keynote address to the CommsDay Regional & Policy Forum in Canberra, the Communications Minister Anika Wells said the final outstanding recommendation from the post-2023 Richard Bean outage review would now proceed. This means a comprehensive review of the Triple Zero legislation and regulations, which, she said “will draw on lessons in 2023 and 2025 Optus outages, the 3G switchover and recently identified device issues.”
Optus accelerates onshoring and automates welfare checks after Triple Zero outage
Optus has accelerated plans to repatriate its network operations centre from Chennai and bring hundreds of call centre roles back to Australia following last year’s Triple Zero outage, with CEO Stephen Rue conϐirming the entire network operations function would ultimately return onshore.
Appearing before the Senate environment and communications references committee, Rue said the decision to bring the network operations centre back to Australia had been taken prior to the September 18 outage but was now being implemented in stages, with functions already transferred since October.
“The entire network operations function,” Rue said, would return to Australia. “Yes, it’s the intention.”
He said portions of the work had already been brought back and the company was determining how to “safely bring back the remaining part of the operations centre” while upgrading systems.
Optus is also repatriating around 300 call centre roles, primarily those dealing with Triple Zero, hardship and vulnerable customers. “We’re bringing back about 300 of those into Australia,” Rue said, adding that close to 100 roles had already been onshored.
Despite a separate consultation process affecting between 200 and 300 positions which we reported on Wednesday, Rue said the company expected its Australian workforce to expand materially over the next 12 months. Optus currently employs around 6,800 people locally and anticipates growing to “probably seven and a half thousand” as network, compliance and systems modernisation programs ramp up.
The structural shift sits alongside operational changes designed to prevent a repeat of the delays that followed the September outage, when extracting unsuccessful emergency call data took hours and welfare checks were conducted manually.
Rue confirmed Optus is developing and testing systems to automate the identification of missed Triple Zero attempts and issue outbound SMS notifications at scale.
“The answer to your question… is being able to automate getting the numbers and automate SMSs,” he said, noting the new process was currently being tested to ensure accuracy.
During the outage, locating relevant call data from deeper within the network proved complex because calls had not reached the core emergency systems. Rue said the extraction timeframe had already been reduced from around 12 hours to approximately 90 minutes.
Optus is also conducting about 2,000 Triple Zero test calls per day at a regional level, significantly expanding monitoring compared with the national-level reporting in place at the time of the incident.
“We now do at what’s called an SA3 level,” Rue said, describing it as more granular regional testing rather than state-based metrics.
Beyond internal changes, Rue told senators the incident had exposed broader industry-level testing and device behaviour issues.
While camp-on emergency roaming normally occurs when a network is fully down, the September outage involved what Rue described as a “very unusual” partial network state. In that scenario, some devices continued seeking the Optus network be- fore attempting to roam, creating delays.
“This is an industry issue,” Rue said, arguing that outages occur globally and require coordinated testing regimes across operators and device manufacturers.
He said the sector was working with regulators, the department and the new Triple Zero Custodian to review device standards, disaster roaming arrangements and emergency testing protocols, cautioning that consumer messaging would need to be carefully coordinated to avoid confusion.
Optus chair John Arthur separately acknowledged governance failures revealed by the Schott review, telling the committee he had been “shocked” by the extent to which risk processes were not followed.
“I certainly was shocked when I read her report when it comes to risk management,” Arthur said. “Although we had controls and processes in place, they weren’t followed.”
Arthur said the board had directed management to “go faster” in embedding cultural and risk reforms, while Rue maintained that strengthening escalation processes, onshoring critical functions and automating welfare systems were designed to ensure emergency services “simply work when it is needed”.
“We are taking a systematic approach to improving the company over time,” Rue said. “Trust is earned through actions, not words.”
Grahame Lynch
IN TODAY’S COMMSDAY (Friday 27 February 2026)
The federal government’s new national cell broadcast emergency warning system will be branded “AusAlert” and will conduct a planned national test in July, with full operational capability now scheduled for October 2026 – around two years later than originally envisaged but ahead of a revised 2027 target.
EXCLUSIVE: NBN Co is funding the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network’s three-year program scrutinising its Replacement Module Application under the Special Access Undertaking, documents obtained by CommsDay under Freedom of Information show.
Australia’s Triple Zero emergency call ecosystem has not kept pace with the shift from 2G and 3G networks to a disaggregated 4G and 5G environment, independent reviewer Dr Kerry Schott has told a Senate inquiry, warning that the September 2025 Optus outage exposed broader structural weaknesses.
Optus has accelerated plans to repatriate its network operations centre from Chennai and bring hundreds of call centre roles back to Australia following last year’s Triple Zero outage, with CEO Stephen Rue confirming the entire network operations function would ultimately return onshore.
Representatives of Apple and Google have been questioned over their relationships with Australian carriers, handset software updated processes and their messaging-based satellite fallback services for customers outside of the range of terrestrial cellular networks.
NEXTDC chief executive and managing director Craig Scroggie has heralded a “step change” at the company, amid a surge in contracted utilisation at the data centre operator’s facilities during the first half.
Swoop Holdings swung to an $800,699 post-tax net loss in 1H26 despite reporting record sales across its NBN and mobile portfolios and a 41% year-on-year lift in revenue to $64.1m.
NetComm has secured More Telecom and Tangerine as launch partners for its new NF71 Wi-Fi 7 gateway and NS71 EasyMesh satellite, marking the first retail deployments of the Australian-designed multi-gigabit devices.
More Telecom has partnered with decision intelligence platform provider SourseAI to embed marketing mix modelling into the telco challenger brand’s operations.
The Commerce Commission has concluded that there are reasonable grounds to begin a formal investigation on deregulating mobile tower co-location.
Spark will block around 300 smartphone models that can make standard calls, send texts, and access data over 4G, but will be unable to make emergency 111 calls once its 3G network shuts down on 31 March due to manufacturer-imposed limitations.
Plus more
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