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Welcome to the latest current affairs that impact communications consumers. 

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Person using smartphone and laptopTelecommunication services have and are rapidly evolving. ACCAN believes the enhancements to quality of life and economic opportunities from being connected should be available to all consumers.

In looking at the future of communication services in Australia it is time for a new focus on consumer needs. The focus to date has centred too much on developments in the telecommunications market and infrastructure rollout. A consumer focus reveals a number of policy gaps that must be addressed now. These are discussed in ACCAN’s new policy position, The Connected Consumer.

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Sad woman using laptopIt’s a sad fact of life that one day we will die.

Many of us think of our legacy simply in terms of money in the bank, superannuation, cars, homes and other physical assets, but with more and more of our lives being lived online we have a large digital footprint we could leave behind as well.

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Una Lawrence presenting at Broadband for the BushToday, ACCAN Director of Policy, Una Lawrence, delivered a presentation on ACCAN’s policy outcomes to improve communications services and products for Australian consumers at the Broadband for the Bush Forum.

The speech identified six areas of focus where current policy settings are not delivering for consumers:

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ACCAN has written to the major political parties (the Liberal Party, the Australian Labor Party, the Nationals and Australian Greens) to raise awareness of the need for politicians and government agencies to ensure that all of their online video content is accurately captioned. See below for a copy of this letter.

YouTube has a function that auto-captions videos uploaded to the site, but these captions are often inaccurate. Videos that are uploaded to Facebook often have no captions.

One in 6 Australians suffer from hearing loss; that’s 1 in 6 consumers who are not able to access online videos due to unreadable captions or a lack of captions. Access to information is especially important during the lead up to the 2016 Election. If videos are not properly captioned then many consumers will miss out on important information.

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TV remote pointing at TVAmending the Broadcasting Services Act to introduce audio description on free-to-air TV is one of ACCAN’s 2016 communications consumer priorities. Introducing audio description on Australian TV would provide greater access for consumers who are blind or vision impaired. Currently there is no audio description on Australian free-to-air TV.

Audio description is additional verbal narration that describes visual elements shown on screen during pauses in dialogue. It can describe elements such as scenes, costumes and actions.

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Female farmer using smartphoneThis week, the Coalition and Labor both announced that if elected they would commit extra funding to the Mobile Black Spot Programme. The announcement that an extra $60 million in funding will be allocated to the Programme is welcomed by ACCAN.

Mobile coverage is a key issue for consumers, particularly those who live in regional, rural, and remote areas. This is clear from the more than 10,600 mobile black spots identified in the Programme so far. Improving mobile coverage is one of ACCAN's ongoing key work priorities.

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Election election graphic showing Australia with seven pointed star and voting box: Your communication prioritiesTo find out more about the communications policies of the major political parties we have posed questions to them on these communications consumer priorities and other important issues. When the answers to our questions are available we will post them on this webpage. More information on communications consumer priorities is available on our Election webpage.

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Small business operators using laptop and smartphoneLast week, Optus announced that it had improved the experience for their small business consumers by offering more specialist team members and having a network of small business consumers.

ACCAN welcomes this announcement. These initiatives are a positive step in the right direction.

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Man talking on phone while using laptopTelecommunications outages happen from time to time. On November 8 2023, Optus experienced a critical nationwide outage on mobile and NBN broadband networks that lasted at least 8 hours and, for some customers, up to 12 hours. As of November 9 2023, Optus is offering affected consumers on eligible plans 200GB of extra data, and free, unlimited data for pre-paid customers on weekends for the rest of the year. For the latest information, see the Optus Outage Response page.

After an outage on its mobile and fixed networks in 2016, Telstra offered its mobile customers free data days as compensation. For the NBN/ADSL outage, Telstra offered a $25 credit to consumers and a $50 credit to businesses who were offline for an extended period of time. This was applied automatically to customer accounts.

Depending on your circumstances, the compensation offered by your telco may not be adequate. If you or your business was affected and suffered losses due to an outage, you may be entitled to seek additional compensation. 

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People at cafe using smartphones and tabletsYou may have noticed that we’ve launched our brand new website. We’ve been working on the new website for quite some time and we’re very excited to finally have it up and running.

The new website is more user-friendly, mobile-friendly and of course, it is accessible to consumers who use assistive technologies like screen readers.

With our new website, we’re well placed to provide consumers with the latest news, information and consumer resources.

The website is now divided into two main areas: Helpful Consumer Information and ACCAN’s Work.

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Have you received a text message like the one below informing you that you’ve subscribed to a subscription service and will be charged a fee for that service?

Image text: Freemsg: >Reply YES now< to get your content from SMSQuest. ($6.60 join + $6.60/msg, 3msg/wk 25c/msg sent). Help? 1800364332. sms stop to 19700800.

These types of messages don’t come from your telco and may result in charges being added to your phone bill. These charges are for third party services which means your telco is allowing another provider to sell content to you which you pay for on your phone bill. What you are buying can be phone apps, pay per view videos, games and other content. They can be one-off charges or ongoing subscriptions.

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Farmer using mobile phoneHow often do you use the internet each week? Statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics released in February 2016 showed that the mean number of hours spent per week on the internet for both males and females is 10 hours.

Ten hours per week doesn’t seem like much time, but when you think about all of the activities we now do online – accessing education, job opportunities, government services and more – our reliance on the internet becomes very clear.

While some of us may take broadband for granted, there is a growing group of consumers from all over the country who are struggling with poor internet services or even no services at all.

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