Optus mobile services are down across the country, affecting millions of Australian customers and businesses.
The outage was first reported at around 4am AEDT, with Optus customers across the country taking to social media to find out what was happening.
Mobile phones are unable to make and receive calls and mobile internet services are also down.
Yes but a landline call, made over a 5g modem connection is not a GSM phone call, it is a sip data call that gets separated out to the emergency system at the isps end, its a higher priority stream than data, but its still data. They didn’t work.
They could have made the modems use GSM phone routing for emergency calls, but they don’t. It’s all sip data.
wait so who won?
SIP is exactly how 4G & 5G calls work already. It is perfectly technically feasible. Whether or not the 3GPP standard covers routers with backup data connections or not is a different question. But the router could, and should, be designed to recognise the number you are dialling is an emergency call and still route it via another carrier’s network. I was also responding to the other person saying it was a competition issue, but other carrier’s are mandated by law in Australia to take those calls.
Like, this was a solved problem literally decades ago. You could plug a phone into the jack and call 000 even if there was no service to the address. It is bloody shameful that this could have occurred in this day and age. There are plenty of rural places without any cell service where people rely on landlines in emergencies. The ACCC should come down hard on them, doubly so if it’s found out that anyone died as a result of the outage.