Australia’s top telcos, including TPG Telecom, Telstra and Optus, have quietly moved to establish a shared database of problematic mobile handsets in a bid to improve the reliability of emergency call services.
iTnews understands that carriers have been pushing the for Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to publish its register of compliant handsets, but the regulator has persistently knocked the recommendation back.
The peak carrier lobby group, the Australian Telecommunications Alliance (ATA), today confirmed to iTnews that the industry has decided to go ahead and establish the handset register on its own.
It’s also currently preparing a submission on the issue for the senate’s inquiry into the Optus September triple zero outage.
ATA chief executive Luke Coleman said that the alliance this month updated the terms of its Device End-to-End Service Testing (DETEST) working group to include the inter-carrier information sharing arrangement.
“This technical information sharing will be undertaken with a view to developing an industry database for device issues and capabilities in relation to triple zero, to assist MNOs with their management of device capabilities,” Mr Coleman said.
At the heart of the issue for carriers is the ACMA’s apparent refusal to publish the list of devices on its register of compliant mobile handsets, sources close to the matter said.
iTnews contacted ACMA for comment on the carriers’ plan, but the regulator declined to comment beyond a short statement saying that discussions with industry about a register of devices were “ongoing”.
Under the Telecommunications Act, the ACMA enforces a testing code intended to provide Australian consumers with a reliable way to know whether their handsets will work reliably on carriers’ mobile networks, including for triple zero services.
Under the code, mobile manufacturers are required to test their products against the regulator’s technical standards, complete a declaration of conformity, keep compliance records and apply a label to their product indicating its compliance.
Carriers argue that this makes any public register of devices known to be good or bad the natural domain of the ACMA.
However, sources familiar with the matter told iTnews that the regulator has refused to accept the responsibility and provide a register of devices to consumers or carriers.
That has prompted the carriers to go ahead without the regulator and create their own shared database which will allow the carriers to report devices that they’ve found to be bad to each other.
The database will not be made available consumers directly.
However, it’s understood that the register will speed up the process of blocking problematic devices, meaning that consumers will be made aware of them sooner.
The carriers’ decision to work on the shared register together arrives during a time when they are struggling to retain the confidence of consumers and Canberra in the wake of a series of triple zero service outages.
The latest is the Optus emergency call service outage in September, which has been linked to at least three fatalities and prompted a parliamentary inquiry into the incident and the overall performance of Australian emergency calling services.
Part of the inquiry will deal with mobile handset “camp on” arrangements which, in simple terms, refers to the way that mobile handsets automatically switch from mobile networks that aren’t working to ones that are during emergencies.
The outage has thrust the issue of handset camp on performance into the public eye due to its central role in ensuring that individuals in distress can still reach first responders in scenarios when their home carrier network’s go dark or are out of reach.
The ACMA has recently tightened rules for testing the camp on performance of mobile handsets. It created a new testing industry code that will require carriers to subject handsets to special tests designed to see how they perform when they’re required to switch networks to place emergency calls.
Telstra and Optus also recently announced that they would block about 70 Samsung handsets with firmware configurations that make them exclusively attempt to route Triple Zero calls to the shuttered Vodafone 3G network.
Telstra’s testing showed that devices were not connecting to TPG Telecom’s Vodafone-branded 4G network correctly when its own and Optus’ networks were not available.
At the time, the carriers gave owners of the handsets 28 days to upgrade the software in the handsets if they could. Otherwise, the handsets would be blocked.