After Optus and Telstra outages, telcos issue new advice on calling Triple Zero

Millions of Australians will receive communication from their mobile telco starting today as the industry unites together to educate the public on how to reliably connect to Triple Zero when needed.

The campaign will see information on the telco websites, as well as email communication and social media, and it comes in the wake of serious network outages in the last 18 months which have resulted in issues with hundreds of Australians trying to call Triple Zero.

During the technical investigations into those outages, several key issues were identified with end-user devices used in the process of calling Triple Zero which may have resulted in delays in getting connected or the ability to call at all.

The campaign attempts to explain the extremely complex Triple Zero system and the backups in place to allow people to understand just why calls might not connect in the extreme case of the caller being in a poor coverage area and experiencing a network outage.

Fundamentally, the telcos need to explain that when you call Triple Zero, your phone first attempts using your own mobile network, but if that network isn’t available - either because you are out of service area or because of some sort of network outage - your phone will try to connect to another mobile network if available.  

This process is known as an “emergency camp-on”.

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In this situation, you don’t need to do anything, your phone does it all for you, at no cost to you and you don’t need a SIM card for the other network; in fact, your phone will do this even if it has no SIM card in it.

However, during the lengthy investigation into both the Optus and Telstra network outages which resulted in failed 000 calls, it became clear that the time it took for a phone to do this “emergency camp-on” was likely quite problematic.

As a result, the industry via its own peak body the Australian Telecommunications Alliance is attempting to educate Australians on how that camp-on might work.  

Critically, explaining that there might be silence on the line while this process happens.

The advice is that if the initial call you make doesn’t connect within five seconds, you should hang up and immediately try again.

However, on any attempts that follow, you need to stay on the line and let the device attempt the connection.   

This means staying on the line for up to one minute, giving your phone the best chance to connect to another network.  

Hanging up again and again simply will not make the process go faster.  

Your phone needs time to scan the environment for other networks and establish a connection.

All our phones show those little “bars” of coverage to let us know how strong our signal is, however if you are outside the service area of your telco you will see “SOS” or “SOS Only”. 

This means your phone can see another network and will attempt that “camp-on” process.

If your phone shows “No Service” it will not be able to call Triple Zero on any network.

Critically, there are a few other tips from the Telcos that everyone should know about creating a reliable emergency calling potential:

• Install the latest software: your phone will get new features, updated security, but also there may be changes to how it’s programmed to handle these Triple Zero calls.
• Regularly restart your phone: a full reboot is recommended to ensure any network and mobile carrier connections are properly in place and configured.
• Turn on Wi-Fi Calling: this means that during a mobile network outage, your device can attempt to use WiFI to route your Triple Zero call.

Luke Coleman, CEO of Australian Telecommunications Alliance (ATA), said: “We’ve been working closely with the three major mobile network operators and the Triple Zero Custodian to develop this campaign.

“Our priority is to ensure Australians are equipped with simple advice they can recall and use in a worst-case scenario if they need to call Triple Zero and find their usual network is unavailable.”

Individual devices might also have additional emergency features like Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite which do not directly interact with the Triple Zero phone system or make a call.

Instead, they use a third party to gather important information about the emergency using a Satellite connection and that is then passed on to emergency services.

Phones with this connectivity might show a different icon like a satellite in the area where mobile signal is normally displayed.