Telecommunications ombudsman calls for change to make mobile phones an essential service

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A Telstra outage that left people without reception for six days in regional WA has highlighted a regulation loophole with mobile technology not being considered an essential service.

Port Denison and Dongara are 353km north of Perth and in July the outage left many people out of reach.

One business, which relies on Telstra for its eftpos machines, estimated it lost up to $18,000 in sales as a result of the outage.

"The reality is that this country is so city-focused that they're forgetting, rapidly, the people in regional areas in so many ways, and this is just another example," she said.

In November last year, more than 10 million Australians and 400,000 businesses were impacted by a 14-hour Optus network outage.

Ms Gebert said people who were not satisfied with a resolution offered by a telecommunications provider had the right to complain to the ombudsman's office.

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4 comments

Oh that's fascinating, I really hope this is resolved in the People's favour.
Minimum levels of service in Australia can be difficult. We're a large sparse country with many mobile black spots. People should rent a satellite phone or epirb if traveling the outback, it's a dangerous place to have an emergency.
- Makes sense, imo:
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A Telstra outage that left people without reception for six days in regional WA has highlighted a regulation loophole with mobile technology not being considered an essential service.
Port Denison and Dongara are 353km north of Perth and in July the outage left many people out of reach.
One business, which relies on Telstra for its eftpos machines, estimated it lost up to $18,000 in sales as a result of the outage.
"The reality is that this country is so city-focused that they're forgetting, rapidly, the people in regional areas in so many ways, and this is just another example," she said.
In November last year, more than 10 million Australians and 400,000 businesses were impacted by a 14-hour Optus network outage.
Ms Gebert said people who were not satisfied with a resolution offered by a telecommunications provider had the right to complain to the ombudsman's office.
The original article contains 684 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!