What Was Published Today
On 24 August 2026, the federal government and Australia's mobile carriers — Optus, Telstra and TPG Telecom — began circulating public advice about what to expect when calling Triple Zero if their network is unavailable. The campaign involves the Triple Zero Custodian and the Department of Communications, and is being coordinated through the Australian Telecommunications Alliance, whose chief executive Luke Coleman described it as simple advice for customers on what to do when contacting Triple Zero if their provider's network is down.
It is being reported as a campaign about delays. It is more accurately a campaign about silence — the specific, unnerving experience of dialling the emergency number and hearing nothing at all while the handset works.
~5 sec
If it has not connected, hang up and redial
60 sec
How long to hold on subsequent attempts
90 sec
Maximum observed during the July outage
21
Recommendations from the Optus outage review
The Advice, Exactly As Issued
Worth reproducing rather than paraphrasing, because the numbers are the whole point and a paraphrase loses them.
The published guidance
“If your initial call doesn't connect within around five seconds, hang up and try again immediately. On subsequent attempts, stay on the line for up to 60 seconds to give your phone the best chance to connect via another network.”
“The ‘emergency camp-on’ process can take time to connect to another network. Generally, there will be silence on the line while this happens.”
Two separate instructions, and the order matters. The first attempt is a short test: five seconds, and if nothing happens, do not persist. The second attempt is where you commit: up to a full minute, in silence, without hanging up.
| Attempt | How long to wait | What you will hear | What to do next |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | Around five seconds | Possibly nothing | Hang up and redial immediately — do not wait it out |
| Second and after | Up to 60 seconds | Generally silence | Stay on the line. Do not hang up because it sounds dead. |
What Emergency Camp-On Actually Is
Camp-on is one of the genuinely good pieces of engineering in Australian telecommunications, and it is worth understanding properly because understanding it is what makes the sixty seconds bearable.
When you dial Triple Zero, your handset does not simply hand the call to your own carrier and hope. If your carrier's network is not available where you are — outside coverage, or during an outage — the handset attempts to place the emergency call through any other carrier network it can detect. That is camp-on.
It works with no credit
A prepaid handset with nothing on it can still reach Triple Zero. Payment status is irrelevant to an emergency call.
It works with a disconnected service
A service that has been cancelled or suspended still places emergency calls. The old phone in the ute glovebox is not useless.
It works with no SIM at all
No SIM card, no account, no relationship with any carrier — the emergency call is still attempted. This is why a decommissioned handset is worth keeping charged in a remote vehicle.
And it takes time
The handset has to detect available networks, select one, and establish the call through a carrier it has no existing relationship with. That negotiation is the silence, and it is why the advice exists.
The design intent, and why the intent matters
Camp-on was designed primarily for the situation where a customer is outside their own network's coverage — a genuine and common Australian problem. It was not designed as an outage remedy for a whole metropolitan network failing at once, which is a different load profile entirely. That distinction explains a lot about why camp-on behaves the way it does under outage conditions, and it is the honest framing: this is a well-built mechanism being asked to do a job adjacent to the one it was built for.
Read the Screen Before You Dial
This is the most immediately useful part of the advice and the part least likely to survive into a news headline. Your handset tells you whether an emergency call is possible before you make it.
| What the screen shows | Platform | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| SOS or SOS only | iPhone — wording varies by iOS version | Camp-on is available. An emergency call can be placed through another carrier's network. Expect the silence. |
| Emergency calls only | Android | Camp-on is available. |
| No service – emergency calls only | Android | Camp-on is available. Note the difference between this and plain "no service" — the trailing words are the whole message. |
| A small SOS icon | Android | Camp-on is available. |
| Plain no service, nothing after it | Both | No mobile network coverage at all. You cannot call Triple Zero over a mobile network from this location. Move, or use another method. |
If it says "no service"
The published advice is direct: “If your phone shows ‘no service’, there is no mobile network coverage available where you are and you will not be able to call 000 using a mobile network.” The alternatives are a landline, or a call over an available Wi-Fi network using Wi-Fi calling. Treat Wi-Fi calling as a possibility rather than a guarantee — support for emergency calls over Wi-Fi varies by carrier and by device in Australia, and an emergency is a poor time to discover which side of that variation you are on. Test it, on your own handsets, before you need it.
Why "Hang Up and Redial" Sounds Wrong and Is Not
Everything most people have ever been told about emergency calls says do not hang up. So it is worth explaining why the official advice now says to hang up after five seconds, because advice you do not understand is advice you will not follow under stress.
The two instructions are doing different jobs.
| First attempt: five seconds then hang up | Later attempts: hold for sixty | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is testing | Whether your own network is available and will simply connect you normally | Whether camp-on can find and establish a path through another carrier |
| Why the short window | A normal connection on a working network is fast. If it has not happened in five seconds, something is wrong and waiting does not fix it. | — |
| Why the long window | — | Because camp-on genuinely takes that long, and hanging up mid-negotiation restarts the whole process from nothing. |
| The failure mode it prevents | Waiting sixty seconds on an attempt that was never going to work | Abandoning an attempt at forty seconds that would have connected at fifty |
Put plainly: the first call is a quick check, the second is the real attempt. That is the sentence to teach, because it is the one somebody will remember when it counts. Anybody who has ever hung up on a silent line after thirty seconds and tried again — which is the instinctive behaviour and was, until today, entirely uninstructed — has been repeatedly restarting a process that needed to be left alone.
Where This Came From
This campaign has a lineage, and knowing it explains why the tone is what it is.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 8 November 2023 | An Optus outage prompts a review, which recommends the creation of a dedicated custodian for the emergency call service. |
| October 2025 | The Triple Zero Custodian is established through legislation, acting on that recommendation. |
| September 2025 | An Optus emergency calling outage lasts almost fourteen hours. As reported, 605 callers sought Triple Zero during it and around 75% of those calls could not connect. Two deaths were associated with the event. |
| 2026 | The independent review by Dr Kerry Schott makes 21 recommendations. Optus accepted all 21. Explaining camp-on to the public was among the review's concerns. |
| Early July 2026 | During a Telstra outage, the maximum observed camp-on connection time reportedly stretched to 90 seconds — longer than the 60 in today's advice. |
| 24 August 2026 | Government and carriers publish the camp-on advice, with the Triple Zero Custodian, ahead of the disaster season. |
Two cautions worth keeping
First, the 90-second figure. Today's advice says up to sixty seconds. A reported ninety during an actual outage is not a contradiction — sixty is guidance about what to expect, not a guaranteed ceiling. For a workplace procedure, the practical instruction is to keep holding rather than to start a stopwatch. Second, separate regulatory proceedings from the review. There are matters concerning emergency call service access before the courts, and nothing there is proven. Nothing in this article turns on those proceedings, and businesses should not build plans on their expected outcome.
Temporary Disaster Roaming: Still Unsettled
Sitting alongside camp-on is a related mechanism that has not landed yet, and its status is the most important unresolved item in this story.
Temporary Disaster Roaming would allow mobile users to roam onto another carrier's network during extended service disruptions caused by severe weather, bushfires or floods — for ordinary calls, not just emergency ones. Trials are under way. The coming disaster season will be its first operational test.
What is not agreed
The carriers have not yet agreed activation thresholds — the conditions under which TDR switches on — or finalised how the system will operate. The Department has described operational details as being carefully worked through with stakeholders. For a business, that means TDR is not something you can plan around this season. It may prove valuable, and we would like it to. It is not a control you can rely on, and any provider presenting it as one is getting ahead of the facts.
What This Means for a Business, Specifically
Most coverage of this will stop at the consumer advice. For a business there are four separate obligations hiding in it, and only one of them is about mobiles.
1. Your emergency procedure is now out of date
If your workplace emergency plan says "call 000" and nothing more, it is missing the two numbers that matter. Five seconds, redial, sixty. That is a one-line amendment and it should happen this week.
2. Somebody has to actually say it out loud
A procedure document nobody reads is not a control. This belongs in a toolbox talk, a team meeting or a shift handover — thirty seconds of somebody's voice, not a policy update email.
3. A fixed line is a different path
None of the camp-on advice applies to a call from a fixed or cloud phone service. That is a genuine reason to have one, and it is covered below.
4. Your registered address has to be right
This is the item businesses actually get wrong, and it costs minutes when minutes matter. Also below.
The Fixed and Cloud Path Is a Different Path
Worth being precise here, because it is easy to overclaim and we would rather not.
Camp-on is a mobile network mechanism. It exists because a mobile handset can see several carrier networks and has to choose one. A call placed from a fixed service or a cloud phone system does not use camp-on at all — it uses the emergency call routing of the service it is on, and the sixty-second silence is not part of that path.
| Mobile handset | Fixed or cloud phone service | |
|---|---|---|
| Uses camp-on? | Yes, when its own network is unavailable | No |
| The 60-second silence applies? | Yes | No |
| Depends on mobile coverage at your location? | Entirely | No — depends on the fixed connection |
| Location known to the operator? | Approximate, from the network and handset | From the registered service address — which is why that address must be correct |
| What kills it | No mobile coverage, or a network outage where no other carrier is reachable | Loss of the internet connection at the site, and no diversion configured |
The honest conclusion is not "cloud phones are safer than mobiles". It is that the two fail differently, which is exactly why a business should have both and should know which one to reach for. A mobile is what you have in your hand in a paddock. A fixed service is what does not care whether three carriers are having a bad afternoon. Redundancy is not two of the same thing.
The Address Problem Nobody Checks
Here is the item we would put at the top if we were allowed only one recommendation from this whole article, because it is the one that is both broken and free to fix.
When an emergency call arrives from a fixed or cloud service, the location information available to the operator comes from the registered service address for that service. If that address is wrong, stale, or a head office rather than the site the call came from, then the most time-critical information in the call is wrong, and the caller — who may be doing CPR — has to correct it verbally.
The four ways it goes wrong
1. The business moved and nobody updated the service record, only the mail. 2. A second site was added and its extensions were provisioned against the original site's address. 3. Remote staff have extensions registered to an office they have not attended since 2021. 4. The address is technically correct but useless — a business park with fourteen units and no unit number, a rural property with no street number, a site whose entrance is on a different road from its address. That last one is the most common and the least noticed.
Check it this week
Ask your provider what address is registered against each service and each site. If they cannot tell you quickly, that is itself a finding.
Add the access detail
Which gate, which entrance, which unit, whether the driveway is on another street, whether there is a locked boom. Put it where whoever calls can read it aloud.
Brief remote workers separately
A staff member working from home should call from their mobile in an emergency at home, not from a softphone registered to the office. Say that explicitly — it will not be guessed.
The Wall Card
Print this. Put it next to the first aid kit, in the smoko room, in each vehicle and on the back of the reception desk. It is written to be read aloud by somebody whose hands are shaking.
CALLING 000 — WHAT TO EXPECT
1. Dial 000. Wait about five seconds.
2. If nothing happens — hang up and dial again straight away.
3. On the second call, stay on the line for up to a minute. It will be silent. That is normal. Do not hang up.
4. Check the top of your screen. SOS, SOS only or Emergency calls only means the call can get through on another network.
5. If it says only "no service" — there is no mobile coverage here. Use the desk phone, or move to where there is signal.
6. Our address for emergency services is: __________________________
7. Access notes: __________________________
Lines six and seven are the ones people skip and they are the reason the card works. A printed address that somebody can read out is worth more under stress than an address somebody knows perfectly well on an ordinary Tuesday.
Lone Workers, Remote Sites and the Coverage Question
Camp-on advice is most consequential for exactly the people least likely to see the campaign: someone working alone, outside the office, in marginal coverage.
| Situation | What changes |
|---|---|
| Lone worker in marginal coverage | The "no service" versus "SOS only" distinction is the difference between being able to call for help and not. Teach the screen check before the dialling procedure. |
| Crews in a vehicle | An old decommissioned handset, charged, in the glovebox is a genuine backup — camp-on works with no SIM and no account. It costs nothing and it is one of the few free safety controls available. |
| Remote site with satellite or fixed wireless | Establish now whether the fixed service can place an emergency call and what address it presents. Do not assume, and do not find out during an event. |
| Sites relying on Wi-Fi calling | Test emergency calling over Wi-Fi on the actual handsets in use. Support varies by carrier and device, and the variation matters more than the average. |
| After-hours single staffing | Whoever is alone at 9pm needs the wall card within arm's reach of where they work, not in the manager's office. |
What This Advice Does Not Fix
It would be easy to end on the wall card and let everybody feel prepared. Three limits deserve stating.
1. It is advice, not a fix
Telling people to expect a minute of silence is a genuine improvement over letting them discover it, and it is not the same as reducing the minute. The engineering work sits with the carriers and the custodian arrangements. What the advice does is stop callers from abandoning attempts that were about to succeed — which is worth real lives and is still not the same as the underlying problem being solved.
2. "No service" still means no call
Camp-on cannot manufacture a network that is not there. In genuine mobile black spots the answer remains a fixed service, a satellite service or moving. No amount of holding the line changes it, and any framing that implies otherwise is dangerous.
3. Temporary Disaster Roaming is not a plan yet
Thresholds are unagreed and the operational detail is unfinished with the disaster season approaching. Treat TDR as a promising development to watch, not a control to rely on this summer.
The summary
Five seconds, hang up, redial, hold for sixty in silence. Read the screen: SOS or "emergency calls only" means camp-on can work; plain "no service" means it cannot. Camp-on works with no credit, no service and no SIM, which makes a charged old handset a free safety control. None of it applies to a fixed or cloud phone call, which fails differently — and that is the argument for having both rather than for preferring one. The single highest-value action from all of this is not the wall card: it is checking that the address registered against every one of your services is correct, current and actually findable.
Related reading: how Triple Zero works from a cloud phone system and the obligations that apply, the September 2025 outage and what it changed, why redundancy on one network is not redundancy, regional coverage, roaming and satellite, and the AusAlert national test for the other half of emergency communications.