Improving customer communications for outages

We are proposing amendments to the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024. We want to incorporate rules for telcos to communicate information to customers in relation to significant local outages and outages caused by natural disasters. 

The new rules proposed are the second stage of implementing the Australian Government response to recommendations made in the Review into the Optus outage of 8 November 2023. There are currently no rules for the way telco providers must communicate with customers about significant local outages. We are proposing an industry standard that requires telcos to share key information with customers and the public during an outage, including outages caused by natural disasters. 

We invite your comments on the draft amended standard to introduce telco obligations to communicate with customers during significant local outages and outages caused by natural disasters.  

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