Ensure every Australian can rely on digital services by providing transparency of the resilience of Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure.
- Destabilised world
Key messages
Australia has recently encountered many catastrophic events, including a pandemic, bushfire and floods. These crises and disasters often affect telecommunications networks, placing additional demands on them and, in some cases, disrupting their operations.
With digital services so essential for Australians’ everyday lives and the economy, governments and industry should work together to identify, treat and mitigate network reliability risks.
Most fixed and mobile network operators reacted quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic. They prevented service disruption by scaling up network capacity, optimising network traffic and activating emergency response plans. As a result, Australia’s digital infrastructure passed a monumental test. However, we must not rest on our laurels.
The frequency, complexity and severity of natural disasters is growing. In a disaster, people rely on essential telecommunications to stay safe and connected, but fires and floods can bring down power and transmission lines, causing mass outages.
While it is important to note there is no way of making infrastructure 100% resistant to disruption, it is imperative to improve the resilience of networks that serve at-risk communities.
What are the impacts?
Consistent policies for emergency management between telecommunications operators and state emergency services will ensure better quality and access to public safety networks, consistent support, improved network reliability and faster restoration of services.
Investing in a resilience and recovery roadmap will improve governance frameworks for providing additional emergency coverage to high-risk areas, evacuation routes and evacuation centres. Continuing to prioritise community safety during emergencies delivers social benefits through improved health outcomes.
Classifying telecommunications as an essential service strengthens the case for introducing network standards to help raise overall industry performance, delivering significant economic performance.
How easy is it to implement?
Government and industry responses to the pandemic demonstrated a high capacity to deliver the reform. However, there will be a cost to providing more funding for redundancy options to respond to natural disasters.
Navigating multiple governments, regulators and industry stakeholders increases the complexity of implementing the reform. However, the outcomes will deliver significant improvements to telecommunications infrastructure capacity.
How certain are the outcomes?
The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements highlighted the urgent importance for all telecommunications network operators to share key asset information with governments, emergency services and utility providers. An intergovernmental data-sharing agreement and responses to the Royal Commission demonstrate confidence in government to successfully implement the reform.
Very high acceptance of the reform is anticipated due to increased bushfire resilience and improved telecommunications performance. However, government lacks full control of the reform, relying on industry to play a major part in delivering improved services.
| Quality |
Telecoms as an essential service
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| Access |
Emergency broadcast
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| Access |
Public Safety Network interoperability
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Read more about this recommendation in 7.1 Improving the resilience of Australia's telecommunications in the 2021 Australian Infrastructure Plan.
Reform implementation pathway
This recommendation comprises of outcomes and activities, which form the reform's implementation pathway.
The implementation pathway is designed to guide change agents on the supporting activities necessary to achieve the overall reform.
For each outcome and activity, we propose change agents to act as:
- Proposed sponsor: facilitate, coordinate and champion the recommendation
- Proposed lead: deliver specific activities or lead related outcomes
- Support: share ownership, contributions or knowledge to enable the reform process.
Enable emergency services and network operators to better respond to emergencies by classifying telecommunications as an essential service and continue to develop management policies such as infrastructure protection, risk planning and vegetation management.
0-5 years
Create a clear legislative framework for improved policies and processes for both state and territory governments and network operators to plan, manage and provide resilient services by consistently classifying telecommunications as an essential service in state and territory emergency management legislation.
0-5 years
Increase preparedness for dealing with outages caused by natural disasters with clearly defined plans to address power resilience and back-up power for telecommunications sites.
0-5 years
Protect communities from lost power and communications outages caused by emergencies with a roadmap for Australia’s energy networks to introduce more power line shielding and line undergrounding in areas at high risk of disaster.
0-5 years
Empower and educate consumers by providing easy-to-understand information about the reliability and performance of all fixed and mobile networks through a public web portal with scores available at point of sale.
0-5 years
Give consumers and businesses comprehensive, easy-to-understand information about network reliability and other key network features by further improving the Measuring Broadband Australia tool to include more reliability measures and simplifying the format of measurements presented as a graded system.
0-5 years
Protect communities from emergencies by developing a comprehensive response and recovery plan, investing in tools, hardware and networks for use by state and territory governments, emergency services and industry.
0-5 years
Protect lives in high-risk bushfire areas with improved cut-through for emergency alert warning system national emergency broadcast messages through the introduction of Emergency Cell Broadcasting across all mobile operators.
0-5 years
Enable network operators and state and territory emergency services to better respond and take better decisions during emergencies by creating a system that enables two-way, real-time access to emergency data and standardised network asset information.
0-5 years
Improve resilience and coverage in high-risk areas and along evacuation routes with new investment in programs such as the Mobile Black Spot Program and the Mobile Network Hardening Program. The investment should prioritise improved mobile coverage and mobile network resilience in areas prone to natural disasters such as bushfires.
0-5 years
Provide emergency services with more coverage and more capability for national public safety networks through a coordinated network expansion plan and capability strategy for improving coverage, capacity and the ability to transmit data.
5-10 years