Australia’s communications and media regulator has fined the country’s largest telecommunications company Telstra Limited more than $3 million for failing to comply with emergency call rules this year.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said an investigation found Telstra breached the rules 473 times during a technical disruption at its Triple Zero emergency call centre on 1 March 2024.
ACMA said the call centre was hampered in transferring calls to emergency services for 90 minutes during the incident.
Although Telstra transferred 346 calls to emergency services using backup phone numbers, it could not provide the callers’ digital locations.
The remaining 127 calls were not transferred because some back-up numbers were incorrect and, in those cases Telstra, provided the callers’ details to emergency services via emails and phone calls.
ACMA member and consumer lead Samantha Yorke said it was concerning that breaches occurred because Telstra neglected to update its back-up phone data.
“Telstra, as the emergency call provider, is at the centre of this critical public safety service,” York said in a statement.
“As such, it must have fail-safe systems and processes in place at all times. In this circumstance its systems and contingency plans failed people in real need.”
She acknowledged that Telstra has historically had a strong record of compliance in its role as the national Triple Zero operator and made considerable efforts to keep the public informed during the outage.
“Telstra has been open and apologetic about the outage, communicated effectively to the public and took a variety of immediate actions when problems were identified. These actions go a long way to restoring the community’s trust in this critical service,” Yorke said.
Telstra (ASX: TLS), which has a market capitalisation of $46.3 billion, reported a net profit of $1.78 billion on had almost $23 billion of revenue last financial year.