ABC Radio Hobart 1 October 2026
Temporary Disaster Roaming
Host: So you might have heard on the news from today, the three major telcos are ready to switch mobile roaming on during disasters if one of their networks goes down in a regional area. It’s a really big deal, actually, and there have been calls for it. At the moment is an industry-led initiative before they get legislated at. Luke Coleman from the Australian Telecommunications Alliance told Lauren Petzit how it works.
Luke Coleman: “If there’s natural disaster – a bushfire, a cyclone, a flood – and it impacts mobile towers of one mobile network operator, and there’s still another surviving network which remains operational, what this means is that the operator of the network which is facing an outage will contact the surviving network operator and ask if they can activate temporary disaster roaming.”
“If there’s sufficient capacity on the network and it’s safe to do so without impacting the surviving network, they can activate temporary disaster roaming and that will mean that for you as a user, you won’t even notice the difference. You’ll continue to be able to make phone calls. send text messages, and you’ll have limited-capacity data services. You can’t expect to have your full usual high-speed data – you will still have enough data to send a WhatsApp or an iMessage, maybe even to check an emergency service website like ‘Fires near me’ for example. So it’s ready to go. It will be turned on from the 1st of October this year and it can be activated by the telcos whenever a natural disaster strikes in a regional or remote area.”
Host: So just running through some of the limitations that people might need to be aware of, I can see it can only be implemented in three different disaster affected areas at any one time and they need to be 400 kilometres apart. Why is that?
Luke Coleman: “There are certain guardrails that have been put on temporary disaster roaming, and that has all been done to ensure that the surviving network stays online. The only thing worse than one network outage is two network outages, and that’s the risk that needs to be managed by the telcos when they’re activating temporary disaster roaming.”
“Part of the guardrails that we’ve put in place is it can be used for a certain amount of towers in a certain geographic area. Those areas do need to be spaced a certain distance apart, because there is a risk otherwise of the network being overloaded by additional users coming onto the network very quickly.”
“TDR is different to emergency calling. Emergency calling you can already do on any available network. So if your usual mobile network faces an outage, your phone will automatically scan for any other available mobile network. That’s a process called camp on. It will camp on to another network to enable you to call Triple Zero.”
Host: Now you’ll be aware that there’s been calls for this to be mandated at legislative level. We know trust in telcos is very low in Australia, so why should Australians trust the telcos to implement this with their interests at heart?
Luke Coleman: “Temporary disaster roaming is a different thing to mandated national roaming or domestic roaming, as it’s sometimes called.”
Host: I’m aware of that. There have been calls to mandate temporary disaster roaming as well.
Luke Coleman: “That’s right, so the telcos have done this off their own bat. There is no requirement for them to do this – the telcos are being good corporate citizens here. And this is part of rebuilding trust with Australians to show that there is no additional charge for this. If you’re a consumer, your phone will just automatically start using another available network where it is safe to do so and temporary disaster roaming has been activated.
Host: Do you have any benchmarks or a framework in place to measure retrospectively whether or not it was implemented successfully?
Luke Coleman: “The telcos will be monitoring temporary disaster roaming very closely over this high-risk weather season. This is the first time that it’s been done – the telcos have been working very closely over this year in preparation for high-risk weather season to get TDR operationalised.”
Luke Coleman from the Australian Telecommunications Alliance there.
ENDS
