Aussie mobile telcos face 'automatic' customer compensation for outages

Australian telcos should have to meet mandatory reliability and performance standards and “automatically” compensate customers impacted by outages, a major review has recommended.

A senate committee examining a string of outages that impacted triple zero calls made the recommendation, which has divided the major parties.

The committee does not say what the reliability or performance standards should look like, nor what the quantum of compensation could be.

But the idea is not unprecedented: a similar scheme impacts NBN Co, which has to pay rebates when certain agreed service standards are missed.

The triple zero committee inquiry said there was a “need for serious action to lift standards across the telecommunications industry.”

“The committee considers that minimum performance and reliability standards for the telecommunications sector are long overdue and urges the government to introduce clear, comprehensive and enforceable standards,” it stated in a near 300-page report.

“The committee expects these standards would help drive greater industry-wide investment in network reliability and decrease the incidence of network outages, including those related to triple zero.”

In addition to standards, the committee called for a penalty regime and for telcos to compensate customers impacted by outages.

It said there should be a “comprehensive automatic compensation scheme for those directly or indirectly affected by service outages.”

But it added that “extensive consultation with consumers, industry, regulators and other stakeholders should be undertaken before any compensation scheme is introduced.”

“Compensation should be automatic for all customers affected by outages,” committee chair Sarah Hanson-Young said in a statement.

“Australians shouldn’t be put through the ringer by telcos when seeking compensation for a service they spend thousands of dollars a year on.”
Labor senators offered cautious support for a compensation scheme.

“[We] support further exploration of a comprehensive compensation framework, contingent on detailed community and industry consultation and evaluation of its interaction with existing telecommunications consumer safeguards,” they wrote.

“The aim should be to create a scheme that provides meaningful and timely redress to consumers, while being fair, practical, and targeted to the specific circumstances where compensation is necessary.”

Coalition senators were less enthusiastic, however.

“We are concerned there is insufficient evidence to support the establishment of such a scheme,” they wrote.

“In recent outages, carriers have established voluntary compensation schemes for customers who can demonstrate loss. 

“This is preferable to an indiscriminate automatic payment to every person affected, regardless of whether loss was suffered.”

Coalition senators backed the need for greater telecommunications infrastructure resiliency, but proposed their own solution: a new requirement on telcos to disclose future network investment plans.

“There remains insufficient transparency about the carriers’ forward investment pipelines, particularly in regional, rural and remote Australia,” the Coalition wrote.

“The government cannot formulate effective regional connectivity, resilience or spectrum policy without a clearer understanding of where the commercial investment frontier now lies.”

The senate committee inquiry also called for:

• a modernisation of laws governing triple zero. This, in Hanson-Young’s words, would ideally see the nationalisation of triple zero. “Putting this emergency service back into public hands will ensure more accountability and more investment in protecting Australians,” she said.
• Independent verification of welfare checks conducted when triple zero calls fail to connect
• An independent review of the Australian Communications and Media Authority, including whether its powers are sufficient to regulate the triple zero space
• An option to text emergency services for help, in addition to placing a voice call, with domestic mobile roaming arrangements in place in the event of a major failure by one telco.
• A public register of devices that function correctly on Australian telecommunications networks.