Early last Wednesday morning, Adrian Ashenden spent 15 minutes immobile on the floor “preoccupied with staying alive” while his wife frantically tried to call an ambulance.
Key points:
- Optus landlines and some mobile phones could not dial triple-0 during the outage
- The regulator is investigating Optus’s failure to connect some emergency calls
- Tomorrow a Senate inquiry is due to question Optus’s chief executive about the outage
The Gold Coast resident and cancer patient had woken up feeling unwell at 3:45am, and by 4am, he had collapsed.
Reaching an ambulance was tricky, because around the same time, the Optus network had also collapsed.
“I tried to call triple-0 and it was strange — the phone was totally dead, there was no dial tone, no nothing,” he told the ABC.
“Then we tried my wife’s phone, and it was the same.”
After two more attempts they eventually connected to triple-0, and an ambulance took Mr Ashenden to hospital for treatment.
While it turned out he was not in “mortal danger”, receiving daily radiation treatment for cancer means he and his wife take any health scare seriously.
“I was totally immobile and unable to do anything whatsoever,” he said.
Optus is facing multiple inquiries over last week’s unprecedented network outage which saw millions of Australians lose phone and internet connections.
Under Australian law, telcos are required to provide customers with the ability to make emergency calls.
However, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has received multiple complaints from people who had problems calling triple-0 during the outage.
Telcos are also required to conduct welfare checks with customers who failed to make emergency calls during an outage, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
Mr Ashenden said no-one from Optus had contacted him or his wife about their ordeal.
More needed to protect emergency service calls
On Wednesday morning, Optus confirmed landlines could not dial triple-0 and encouraged customers who needed to contact emergency services to use a mobile.
Later that day, the telco confirmed some mobiles could not call triple-0 either, and advised those who needed emergency services to find “a family member or neighbour with an alternative device”.
Experts like Mark Stewart, from the Centre for Defence Communications and Information Networks at the University of Adelaide, said there appeared to be “multiple shortcomings” in Optus’ disaster planning.
“Good risk-management practice should have isolated the triple-0 services from this [network issues] entirely,” he said, adding there should have been a “backup plan to handle triple-0 services even if every other device in the Optus network has failed”.
Telecommunications consultant Paul Budde said telco companies usually had a separate system for triple-0 calls to prevent emergency calls being affected by network problems.
“I think a lot of things went wrong in this situation,” he said.
The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has allocated extra resources to handle complaints about the Optus outage.
Customers who could not contact triple-0 during the outage were being prioritised, ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said.
“When essential services fail it is often our most vulnerable community members that can be the most impacted,” she told the ABC.
Senate, government and regulator all investigating Optus
Last week, the ACMA launched an investigation into telco’s failure to connect some customers to triple-0.
If Optus is found to have breached the law, it could face a fine.
A Senate inquiry into the outage is also expected to investigate triple-0 failures, with Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin due to face questioning on Friday morning.
Greens senator and communications spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young, who is chairing the inquiry, said she wanted to see fair compensation for those affected by the outage.
“The lives and livelihoods of millions were acutely disrupted on November 8,” she said.
“The public deserves better.”
Optus offered affected customers 200GB of free data, however the ombudsman said this might not “meet the expectations” of consumers and small businesses who suffered more significant losses.
Mr Ashenden said the free data was “no use” to him or his wife, who probably use less than 5GB a month.
“We didn’t need it last Wednesday morning. We don’t need it now. We won’t need it in the future,” he said.
“What we need is a reliable connection, because I have health problems and I want to be able to contact people when I have to.
“Telstra and Optus need to be made more accountable, because their services are vital for so many people.”
Optus was contacted for comment but did not respond to questions before deadline, instead referring the ABC to its website.
Earlier this week Ms Bayer Rosmarin apologised to customers and said the telco had taken steps to ensure a large outage did not happen again.
