Former diplomat says Telstra ‘priority’ service failures putting wife’s life at risk

Telstra promised Alastair Gaisford that his wife’s healthcare was a priority. 

But he says 15 landline outages, including some that could have prevented the ability to call Triple Zero (000) in an emergency, have convinced him otherwise.

Telstra’s most recent nationwide mobile outage failed to connect more than 600 calls to Triple Zero and caused major problems for businesses and transport networks, with the company due to front a Senate inquiry today.

Mr Gaisford’s property lies less than half an hour away from the corridors of power inside Parliament House, near the border of New South Wales and the ACT. Mobile black spots cover the area.

Mr Gaisford’s wife and son suffer from life-threatening asthma, which makes his Telstra landline account eligible to fall under Priority Assistance for Life-Threatening Medical Conditions — a service that the telco is required to provide under its carrier licence. 

“Were they to have an attack at home, and if they were at home on their own, and the priority assist landline wasn’t working, and they weren’t able to call an ambulance, they would probably die,” he said.

“That’s not an insignificant concern.”

Telstra describes its priority assistance policy as a priority fault repair and connection service for people at high risk of emergencies, which applies only to fixed landlines.

Under the Australian Communications Industry Forum (ACIF) — the industry code for people with priority accounts — the telco must provide the highest level of service reliability. The code also includes that priority customers must be able to call Triple Zero.

Mr Gaisford said he had been unable to call Triple Zero for a total of 150 days intermittently since December of 2023. He said the telco had permitted him on several occasions to try to call the emergency number to test it. 

“When our priority assist landline fails, as it has 15 times, we will be unable to call for an ambulance because our mobile phones don’t work,” he said.

Telstra said in a statement that 140,000 customers are under the Priority Assistance for Life-Threatening Medical Conditions Policy.

“Of those customers, just over a third also have a big button phone to provide extra support to access emergency services. This device includes a pre‑installed 4G SIM and an internal battery backup, which allows calls (including to 000) to be made during a power outage, independent of mains power,” it said. 

Last year, Mr Gaisford made a submission about his issues to the Optus outage Senate inquiry, where he outlined his concerns that the terms of that inquiry did not include scope to look at the priority assistance service’s ability to call Triple Zero in an emergency.  

That inquiry made 21 recommendations to Optus, after the prolonged outage was linked to two deaths. Those recommendations included setting up a system for customers to test if their devices could connect to emergency services.

In March, months before Telstra’s nationwide outage on July 8, a survey commissioned by the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) found: “One-in-10 consumers report that they or a member of their family could not contact Triple Zero from a mobile phone due to a mobile outage in the past 12 months.”

‘We wouldn’t be able to call an ambulance’

Mr Gaisford said that if his Telstra landline was down, given the patchy mobile signal in his area, he or his wife or son would have to get in the car in order to call Triple Zero.

“Plain and simply, we wouldn’t be able to call an ambulance, and that assumes that one, we are conscious, and two, we are mobile enough to be able to crawl out to the car, drive one and a half kilometres up the road and then casually make a phone call for an ambulance to come from Canberra,” he said. 

The former diplomat turned donkey breeder said that his problems with Telstra led him to purchase another mobile phone with Optus to be able to make phone calls at his property. He said he had contacted Telstra about the issues over 100 emails and 150 calls. 

To address the issues with his mobile coverage, Telstra has delivered a mobile signal booster and a Starlink aerial, which Mr Gaisford said have not been able to be installed.

It also sent a big button phone, powered by a SIM card; however, Mr Gaisford said without a reliable Telstra signal in his area, it has not been able to work. 

In a letter, viewed by the ABC, Telstra told Mr Gaisford it would be unable to install the Starlink aerial due to “roof tile condition”. It also said his property had a “lack of compliant location”.

Telstra said it would not pay for the costs for an external contractor to install it, and he said if he used a non-registered Telstra contractor, then he and his wife would be stripped of their priority assistance status on their landline.

Telstra did not respond to some of the detailed questions about Mr Gaisford’s claims of landline outages at his property.

“These requirements remain outstanding more than a year later.”

After the first recorded outage in 2023, Mr Gaisford said he waited 50 days for repairs to restore his priority assistance landline outage, which is not within the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA) 24-hour limit, detailed in the ACIF code.

ACMA has been contacted for comment on Mr Gaisford’s issues.