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This week
IN THE NEWS: Scams Awareness Week underway, your USO questions answered, and last chance for Sue Salthouse Memorial Lecture tickets
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We’re currently in National Anti-Scams Week, an initiative of the ACCC and the National Anti-Scam Centre. This year, ACCAN is helping raise awareness of impersonation scams. We’re encouraging consumers to slow down when they receive a text message, email or phone call, and ask: 'who's really there?' Australians have lost over $400 million to scams so far in 2023, and most involve some form of impersonation - scammers tricking us into believing they are government officials, trusted brands, friends or family members. For more tips and resources, visit the Scams Awareness Week website above. [ACCC, National Anti-Scam Centre]
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The 2023 Sue Salthouse Memorial Lecture will be held on Tuesday December 5th. This year's online keynote address will be delivered by Emma Bennison, Chief Innovation Officer at Life Without Barriers. The free event honours ACCAN Life Member Sue Salthouse and her unfailing commitment to disability advocacy and human rights, celebrating the huge contributions she made to improving the accessibility of telecommunications for people with disability in Australia. This event will provide Auslan interpretation and Closed Captions. [ACCAN, via Humanitix]
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The Australian Government is seeking feedback on the future of the Universal Service Obligation (USO) beyond 2024. ACCAN has created an explainer-style blog post to answer some of the general questions you may have about this important consumer protection and outline our role in the review process. [ACCAN]
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The Federal Government’s inquiry into the Optus outage will focus on access to triple zero emergency numbers and the effectiveness of public messaging from government agencies, released terms of reference have revealed. The review will not report on matters of compensation or the technical fault behind the outage, though it will consider customer communication requirements in the case of national outages, and resilience and interdependency implications for the telecoms sector more broadly. [Minister Rowland]
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Telstra has emerged as the dominant bidder in Australia’s recent auction of spectrum between the 3.4GHz and 3.7GHz bands, which is used primarily for 5G devices. Telstra spent nearly $550 million on 326 spectrum lots across a large swathe of the continent. Competitors TPG spent $128 million on capacity in all major cities (except Darwin), and Optus spent $33m on coverage in rural northern NSW and southern QLD. [CRN]
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Telstra has been fined $300,000 by the ACMA for “failing to provide accurate details of thousands of customers” on the Integrated Public Number Database, a record of public phone numbers used to help locate 000 callers and warn residents of emergency situations. Telstra were previously fined $2.5 million in 2021 for similar breaches of the IPND rules. Compliance with the IPND conditions is particularly important heading into a hot summer with an increased risk of bushfires. [Mumbrella]
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In response to a question on notice to the recent Senate inquiry into the November 8 outage, Optus has confirmed that some small business customers had received cash payments as compensation for business losses or inconvenience caused. While a further breakdown of cash amounts paid was not disclosed, it is the first indicator that Optus will offer some customers compensation beyond additional data, temporary speed boosts or account credits. [ABC]
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Social media platform Twitter (X) has been removed from the voluntary Misinformation and Disinformation Code for failing to engage in discussions with the relevant Digital Industry Group subcommittee. Twitter had pulled out of talks about its shutdown of misinformation reporting channels and hadn’t provided documents promised in lieu of meeting. The news comes only a week after the platform failed to pay a fine to the eSafety Commissioner for shortfalls in reporting about child sexual exploitation materials on its site. [The Guardian]
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The NT government has announced that 58 remote schools will receive LEOsat connections as part of its $4 million a year Schools Connectivity Uplift Program. The government expects the program to bring faster and more reliable coverage to schools for which fibre or fixed wireless connectivity is uneconomical. [Mirage News]
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The first National Anti-Scam Centre quarterly report has found that, between July and September 2023, Australians lost $114 million to scams. It also found that jobs & employment scams are growing at a concerning rate, with Australians losing $20.3 million (an increase of 633.5% since last year) in this category. [National Anti-Scam Centre]
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If you are Deaf, or have a hearing impairment or speech impairment, you can contact us on 02 9288 4000 through your preferred National Relay Service call number or access point.
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Although we take care to direct subscribers to sites with accurate and reliable content, we advise that ACCAN is not responsible for the content within external sites and has no control over the views, services or information contained therein. Information contained on external sites may not necessarily reflect ACCAN's policy, standards or beliefs. The information contained in or attached to this message is intended only for the people it is addressed to. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, disclosure or copying of this information is unauthorised and prohibited. This information may be confidential or subject to legal privilege. If you receive this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete the e-mail and any attachments. The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network does not warrant that the information in this e-mail or any attachments are free from any viruses, defects, errors, interception or interference.
The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network's representation of residential and other consumers' interests in relation to telecommunications issues is supported by the Commonwealth through the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts.
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