From CommsDay of 28April 2026
This week’s CommsDay Story of the Week is from an article in Tuesday’s issue. Reliable access to Triple Zero emergency services is a long-running issue, and, in various ways, it will continue to be a central focus of many news stories about the telecommunications sector. The story in Tuesday’s issue of CommsDay is about two aspects of Triple Zero operations – the actual call levels and success rates expressed in Telstra’s operational data, on the one hand, and user perceptions of the reliability and accessibility of the service as revealed in ACCAN’s customer service, on the other. Readers might well conclude that the reality and perceptions of that reality are different things, but the reasons for the disconnect are important. Is the survey itself reliable, are issues of consumer trust involved, and/or are there other factors at play? We may have better answers in the fullness of time.
Telstra says Triple Zero call attempts are 99.97% successful
Telstra has disclosed that calls to Triple Zero over its network achieve a 99.97% success rate, with some initially unsuccessful attempts subsequently completed on retry, as debate continues over consumer survey findings on emergency call reliability.
The data release followed six weeks of scrutiny surrounding an Australian Communications Consumer Action Network survey, conducted by Essential Research, which reported that one in ten consumers said they or a family member had been unable to contact Triple Zero on a mobile phone due to an outage in the past 12 months.
The survey attracted criticism from the Australian Telecommunications Alliance and Telstra, and prompted requests for further detail on methodology from both the Triple Zero custodian and the Australian Communications and Media Authority. The issue was subsequently taken up by a Senate committee inquiry into Triple Zero, which published related correspondence.
In a response to a question on notice published by the committee, Telstra said that between April 2025 and March 2026, 4,369 calls were unable to reliably connect to Triple Zero at one point in time, out of 14,489,562 calls delivered to the emergency call taking platform.
“Some of those callers would have made a retry and were successful,” the company said. “14,489,562 calls were delivered to the relevant termination point for the call (Triple Zero call taking platform). As a percentage the failure rate is less than 0.0302% of the total attempts to Triple Zero that are capable of detection; and of the 4369 calls that failed on the Telstra network,1648 callers received a welfare check.”
“This occurred after Telstra used the caller identification information to confirm that those callers had not called back to reconnect to the emergency call service after an initial call attempt,” Telstra added. “As we have set out in our previous evidence before the Senate Committee, Telstra reiterates that it does not have any data of calls that failed on another network before reaching the termination point for Emergency Call Person, or calls that could not be initiated at all due to lack of coverage and would therefore not reach any network to allow for detection.”
Telstra said it assumed that “unable to connect” includes any voice call that is terminated unexpectedly rather than where a caller takes an active action to hang up, and can include instances such as sudden loss of network connectivity, signalling interruptions between network elements, or abrupt device-side failures but excludes scenarios for where a caller misdials or is outside terrestrial network coverage.
There remains no comprehensive metric for mobile network availability expressed as a percentage of time in Australia. By comparison, NBN data indicates network availability of 99.93%.
Based on more than 14 million Triple Zero calls over the period and approximately 12 million premises nationally, the figures imply an average of just over one emergency call per premises annually.
CONCERNS: Telstra had earlier raised concerns directly with ACCAN that publication of the survey risked creating a misleading impression of mobile network reliability. In a 16 March letter, Telstra group general counsel Lyndall Stoyles said: “If your data relates to faults that occur before reaching the Emergency Call Person, the implication of ACCAN’s statements about Triple Zero call failures is that 10 percent of all mobile calls in Australia fail due to outages. Approximately 65 million successful voice calls are made daily on Telstra’s network alone. ACCAN is representing that, at a minimum, 6 million calls fail per day due to outages. On its face, that is absurd.”
ACMA initially sought survey data, methodology, full questions and analysis from ACCAN on 19 March. On 14 April it followed up, writing: “while ACCAN provided some methodological information and data outputs on 19 and 30 March 2026, ACMA has not received a complete survey instrument or sufficient detail to enable a complete assessment of the issues as part of our advisory functions.”
The regulator subsequently invoked its Telecommunications Act Section 552 information gathering powers, stating: “To date, the information ACCAN has provided to ACMA in response to ACMA’s requests does not include the complete survey instrument. ACMA considers that a complete survey instrument would include the full sequence and flow of questions, survey programming and logic, and any explanatory text or definitions provided to respondents to frame individual questions. In the absence of this information, ACMA is unable to understand the basis of the concerns identified in ACCAN’s research in order to fulfil the performance of its functions on
matters relevant to Triple Zero.”
ACCAN chief executive Carol Bennett told a Senate hearing last week: “If consumer groups… can’t put on record what we believe to be important information… and we’re receiving coercive powers notices… then I don’t know how anyone can have confidence that this system is representing consumer interest.”
Grahame Lynch
IN TODAY’S COMMSDAY (Friday 1 May 2026)
Viasat confirmed the successful launch and initial signal acquisition of its ViaSat-3 F3 satellite, positioning the platform as a major uplift in capacity and flexibility for ANZ and the Asia Pacific region generally.
Vocus has launched a new partner program, dubbed Pure, that offers access to the telco’s enlarged network footprint following last year’s $5.25 billion acquisition of TPG Telecom’s fibre assets and fixed enterprise, government and wholesale business.
Telstra Enterprise has wrapped up the final, Sydney leg of its five-state Together26 event series. Telstra Enterprise chief customer officer Peggy Renders told CommsDay that Together26 had been about bringing the telco’s Connected Future 30 strategy, launched in May last year, to life.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is consulting on new record keeping rules covering application-to-person (A2P) SMS.
Telstra has proposed cutting around 160 roles in its international division as part of a five-year transformation partnership with Accenture, according to Information Age, in reporting confirmed by CommsDay.
Telstra CEO Vicki Brady said more than three-quarters of Telstra employees are now using AI tools at least weekly, with the company observing a 15-20% improvement in software release cycles alongside broader technology and skills investments.
One NZ has entered into a commercial agreement with former owner Vodafone Group to help provide network API access to New Zealand businesses.
New Zealand telcos expect government efforts to bolster the cyber security posture of critical infrastructure to involve substantial costs, an industry association has said, based on the experience of Australian operators with the Security of Critical Infrastructure regime.
Starlink will be able to legally provide services in Papua New Guinea, with the National Information Communications and Technology Authority issuing operator licences to the satellite company.
AirTrunk has announced plans to develop two new hyperscale data centre campuses in Johor Bahru, adding more than 280MW of capacity and taking its total Malaysian footprint to over 700MW across four sites.
Circles, the technology company behind mobile virtual network operators in Singapore and a dozen other countries, said it is leveraging a multi-year collaboration with OpenAI to launch a suite of customer care capabilities under the umbrella portfolio, AI concierge.
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