CommsDay Story of the Week - from CommsDay 11 December 2025

The following story appeared in CommsDay yesterday.  It is part of an ongoing story and series of interconnecting issues associated with the Senate's review of the Triple Zero Emergency Services system and occasional catastrophic failings.

An important aspect of the story is how the Triple Zero saga is raising questions about adjacent issues such as the appropriate scope for industry co-regulation and self-regulation in Australia. This was strongly raised in the Senate hearings by Carol Bennett, CEO of ACCAN. Carol has spoken at TelSoc seminars in the past.

Issues associated with co-regulation and self-regulation will not go away; nor will the concerns about Triple Zero. 

ACCAN pushes for new telecoms act to classify communications as essential service
Australian Communications Consumer Action Network CEO Carol Bennett used the Senate’s Triple Zero inquiry to call for a wholesale rewrite of the Telecommunications Act so that communications are directly regulated as an essential service rather than largely left to industry “self-regulation.”

Appearing before the committee, Bennett said recent Triple Zero failures had exposed “devastating consequences” from a legislative framework that does not treat telecommunications in the same way as sectors such as energy and water.
“Telecommunications are not treated as an essential service, and that is why we’re here,” she told senators. The Telecommunications Act “doesn’t enshrine the protections or the safeguards that are in place for other equivalent essential services. The words essential and safety do not appear in any meaningful capacity in the Act.”

Bennett argued that current arrangements “place priority on self-regulation”, leaving key decisions on coverage, reliability and service quality “to the judgment of the telecommunications providers.”
“This has created an environment in which telecommunications companies write their own rules, which are seldom enforced and even more rarely result in any form of tangible penalty when they are inevitably breached,” she said.
ACCAN is calling for “signiϐicant reforms” to modernise the Act and shift from what Bennett described as “effectively self-regulation” to a direct regulatory framework consistent with other essential services. She said this should include minimum service standards, a reliability regime and meaningful penalties.

Bennett supported her argument by citing an explanatory statement to the original Act indicating that “parliament intends that telecommunications be regulated in a manner that promotes the greatest practicable use of industry self-regulation” and “does not impose undue ϐinancial and administrative burdens” on industry. However, Bennett’s citation appeared to omit the rest of the sentence in the memorandum, which continues: “but does not compromise the effectiveness of regulation in achieving the objects of the legislation.”

She also appeared to misspeak when she told the committee “we’re not back in 1987 when the telco Act was written when we had landlines and payphones.” The Act was drafted and passed in 1997, at a time when telecommunications markets already closely resembled today’s, with multiple ϐixed and mobile networks and interconnect- based competition across both voice and internet services. Mobile adoption was approaching 40% of households and growing at around 10% of the population annually.

Bennett further criticised what she characterised as a long-standing “light touch” approach by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. “What we have seen over a very long period of time is a regulator that has left it to industry to write their own rules, to monitor their own rules, to review their own rules,” she said. This, she argued, had contributed to failures ranging from Triple Zero outages to “unconscionable sales practices” and data breaches. ACMA ϐines were “really the cost of doing business, if that”, creating “a culture of impunity when it comes to protecting the public interest and public safety.”

She said the sector had reached a “tipping point” after repeated Triple Zero incidents. “Given that we’re talking about multiple people having died as a result of this service not working, there is a moral obligation, but there should be a very direct regulatory and legislative underpinning and there simply isn’t.”

Bennett also questioned ACMA’s stated intention not to use a traditional auction for expiring spectrum licences, describing spectrum as “a public asset that is ϐinite and valuable”. She said public auction remained the best mechanism to secure appropriate value. If government chose another allocation method, she argued, discounted licences should at least carry obligations such as mandated regional investment or cheaper plans for vulnerable customers.
Telecommunications industry ombudsman Cynthia Gebert, appearing in the same session, outlined TIO data on Triple Zero-related complaints and backed stronger direct consumer protections. The ombudsman received 120 complaints about failed Triple Zero calls between July 2024 and October 2025, plus a further 567 complaints from consumers concerned they might be unable to reach Triple Zero due to cover- age, landline faults or device issues.

Staff Reporter

IN TODAY'S (FRIDAY 12 DECEMBER 2025) ISSUE

FIRST: The Australian Communications and Media Authority has launched a voluntary Equipment Safety Pledge for major ecommerce platforms, expanding its oversight of online sales of radiocommunications devices. Although framed around equipment safety, the pledge is expected to have secondary effects on the supply of grey market mobile handsets in Australia at a time when device behaviour has become a central theme of Senate scrutiny into recent Triple Zero failures. 

Telstra has expanded Starlink satellite direct-to-mobile messaging services to enterprise customers on eligible Adaptive Mobility plans. 

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has formally warned Supa Networks for allegedly failing to notify the regulator of planned and completed broadband infrastructure installations under the statutory infrastructure provider regime. 

The .au domain space managed by auDA and broadcasting assets will be among the categories of critical infrastructure set to be subject to more stringent risk-management rules under proposals circulated by the Department of Home Affairs.

Advanced Software Engineering COE has been named as the winning team of the Connected Future Hackathon 2025, jointly delivered by Telstra and Nokia through the telco's muru-D innovation hub. 

SpaceX has endorsed an Australian Communications and Media Authority plan to permit interim use of the W band for fixed satellite service earth station uplinks, while the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology have urged caution over potential impacts on radio astronomy and weather systems. 

New research commissioned by digital operations management firm PagerDuty has found that Australians were more likely to report a service failure from their telecommunications provider in the past year than from any other sector, including banking and financial services. 

Plus more

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