ABC Radio Sydney Mornings 1 October 2026
Temporary Disaster Roaming
Host: Another change happening is the activation of the temporary disaster roaming. That means that when one telecommunication network goes down, say, in a severe storm, a bushfire or a flood, customers will now be connected to a rival network. What do you think of that news? 1300 222 702 is the number to call.
Luke Coleman is the Chief Executive of the Australian Telecommunications Alliance and is with you now. Very good morning to you, Luke. Thanks for standing by.
Luke Coleman: Thanks for having me on the program
Host: So this has been years of testing in the making. Can you just take me and my listeners through exactly how this is going to work, which telcos are involved?
Luke Coleman: Sure, so this is going to be an agreement between all three of the major telcos, Telstra, Optus and Vodafone, run by TPG Telecom. Basically, how it will work is this. If you’re living in a regional or a remote area and a natural disaster strikes, so if it’s a flood, a bushfire, a cyclone, and that takes out one of the mobile networks, that operator who’s facing the outage is going to get in touch with the operator of the surviving network in the area and request that they activate temporary disaster roaming. The surviving network, they will then make an assessment: do they have sufficient capacity to bring on all of those users from the network facing the outage? And if they do have capacity, they’ll activate it.
From a user’s perspective you won’t notice the difference – you will immediately switch over to that new network you’ll be able to make voice calls, you’ll be able to send text messages, you’ll have limited data services – so you’ll be able to send iMessages, WhatsApps, check apps like Fires Near Me. You won’t have the full suite – you won’t be watching Netflix, but you will still be able to use basic data services.
Host: In a disaster, you might put Netflix on the back burner for a little while. You mentioned regional areas there, Luke. Does this cover everyone in regional areas? Because we know that some areas just have one telco.
Luke Coleman: That’s right. So in areas where there’s only one telco, obviously it doesn’t create another network out of nowhere. In areas where there’s only Telstra coverage, if there’s a natural disaster, Telstra may still decide to activate disaster roaming to enable Optus and Vodafone customers to use their network. But if the primary network is down and there’s no other networks available, then there will still be no coverage.
Host: Okay, so it won’t, essentially, it’s going to cover a lot more people, but it won’t cover everybody.
Luke Coleman: It’s not a silver bullet, but it will provide a backup if a network goes down and there’s another network available, it means that you’ll be able to use that other network for the period of the outage.
Host: How long has this been in the making?
Luke Coleman: It has been brewing for a few years now. The telcos in recent months in particular have been doing rigorous testing to make sure that the systems are all embedded and in place. It was one of the recommendations after the Black Summer bushfires that we would enable temporary disaster roaming. It is a relatively new service – only a very small number of countries around the world have done this, so it’s a pretty innovative solution that’s been done here in Australia and it’s ready to go ahead of this high-risk weather season.
Host: We know that telcos have the power to turn on and off this disaster roaming, but my understanding is that neither the industry nor the government has outlined real accountability measures here. What is your understanding of that and why?
Luke Coleman: So at the moment it is a decision that is for the telcos, because it’s only the telcos that have that situational awareness. When a disaster strikes and there is an outage, only the telcos have that knowledge at their fingertips of how many users have been impacted by it, does the surviving network have sufficient capacity to bring those users across? Because the priority has to be keeping that surviving network operational. The only thing worse than one network outage is two network outages – so they have to make that decision, boots on the ground, the people who are looking after the network at the time of the outage, and that decision is best made by the telcos themselves.
Host: So is it sensible though to give that to a commercial enterprise over the government when we have seen major telcos face immense scrutiny over these Triple Zero failures? Shouldn’t it be important to have a stronger accountability process in place in case we run into those sorts of problems when there are issues again?
Luke Coleman: Well, the reality is that the telcos will have people working in disaster rooms. Whenever there’s a natural disaster, state governments and emergency services operators will often stand up a situation room, telcos will usually be working very closely with emergency services operators and state governments when those disasters strike to try and keep networks up and running and operational.
But ultimately, it remains the case [that] governments won’t have that insight into what the network conditions are like at the time of an outage. The telcos do have that information in their network operation centres, and that means that those decisions can be made as possible with the safety of the surviving network being the key priority.
Host: Okay, really appreciate you coming in and sharing that information and giving us a bit more clarity around that Luke.
ENDS
