ACCAN recently submitted to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) regarding the proposed Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024 (the standard). ACCAN welcomes the development of an industry standard for communications, having called for stronger action in this field following the Optus Outage on 8 November 2023.
ACCAN is concerned that the proposed standard provides insufficient communications standards to inform consumers exposed to outages, while also being too ambiguous for carriers and carriage service providers to effectively comply with. ACCAN strongly recommends that the ACMA revise the standard to strengthen and streamline its requirements, to better emphasise requirements which support consumer welfare.
ACCAN’s submission recommends that the ACMA:
- Provide clearer and more expansive definitions of ‘major’ and ‘local’ outages.
- Eliminate the exception for natural disasters.
- Strengthen the communications requirements for carriers and carriage service providers by requiring more pro-active and broader communications to consumers in case of outages.
- Provide explicit accessibility requirements within the standard.
Download: 
ACCAN Submission to Outage Communications Standard 2024349.77 KB
Download: 
ACCAN Submission to Outage Communications Standard 2024216.83 KB