Australia’s telecommunications networks underpin essential government, public health, and safety infrastructure. They support critical services for consumers and businesses and facilitate almost every aspect of our everyday home and work lives. What we have come to expect from our telecommunications services has been shaped by this reliance.

On 8 November 2023, this system received a shock, when the Optus network suffered a national outage. Emergency services were compromised. Hospitals were hampered in their critical work. Businesses lost the ability to trade. Transport networks were disrupted. These breakdowns posed real risks to personal health and safety, resulted in the loss of income and productivity and caused widespread distress in many parts of our community.

Following the outage, the Australian government announced that the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts would conduct a post-incident review, led by Richard Bean, of what industry, government and the community can learn from the event, with a specific focus on emergency calls, along with customer communications, complaints handling and compensation processes.

As required by the Terms of Reference, the review focused on the functioning of Triple Zero during the outage, the role of government in managing and responding to national service outages, the adequacy of requirements for customer communication in national service outages, the adequacy of customer complaints and compensation processes following the outage, and other telecommunications sector implications.