Peak communications consumer body ACCAN has expressed concern following today\u2019s news that Telstra has been fined for failing to maintain access for more than 12 hours to the 106 emergency call service used by Australians with hearing and speech impairments.This represents a critical failure in Telstra\u2019s duty as the nation\u2019s designated emergency service call provider and falls well short of the standard the public expects from Australia\u2019s largest telecommunications company.ACCAN CEO Carol Bennett said that the incident must be treated as a warning sign\u2014and a call to action to modernise Australia\u2019s emergency call infrastructure.\u201cPeople with hearing impairments rely on the 106 service as their lifeline to emergency assistance. When this fails, their safety is at risk,\u201d Ms Bennett said.\u201cWe are fortunate that no one was harmed during this outage\u2014but relying on luck is not a public safety strategy. This should be treated as a near-miss and a wake-up call.\u201d\u201cWe thank\u00a0Telstra for committing to an independent review of what went wrong and look forward to hearing how systems and processes will be strengthened to prevent a recurrence.\u201d\u201cThis incident underscores the urgent need to modernise Australia\u2019s emergency services. Text-to-Triple-Zero is already in place in many countries. Australia must not fall further behind.”\u201cWith new technologies such as\u00a0SMS via low-earth orbit satellite becoming available, the time to implement accessible, resilient emergency communication is now,\u201d Ms Bennett said.ACCAN continues to call on the Federal Government to prioritise investment in a \u2018Next Generation Triple Zero\u2019 system to ensure all Australians\u2014regardless of location or accessibility needs\u2014can reach emergency services reliably, at any time.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Peak communications consumer body ACCAN has expressed concern following today\u2019s news that Telstra has been fined for failing to maintain access for more than 12 hours to the 106 emergency call service used by Australians with hearing and speech impairments.This represents a critical failure in Telstra\u2019s duty as the nation\u2019s designated emergency service call provider […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19731,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19730,"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19729\/revisions\/19730"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajournaux.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}