What the parent poster probably means by rolling heads is, this should not just be a fine to the telco but literally people going to jail for the criminal negligence.
How else is there going to be change? A money fine is just an operational expense that can be offset and "part of business if someone dies because of bad testing".
It's more a structural issue.
Whilst it is a large chunk of assets, there's lots of competition so not really exciting. AUD has weakened, which makes it worth less by default.
So if you were its owner (in Singapore) what would you do? You can't really sell it (not worth it), you can't really invest in it but you don't want to fold it.
They never had a say. Their parent Singtel were always effectively calling the shots.
There wasn't an automated way to test it, and most people never thought at all about the emergency call routing because it was such a low number of calls (I think single digits ever).
It's easy to see how you could accidentally break emergency calling and not notice.
In Australia, you can call 000, say you’re testing a phone system, read out the Caller ID you’re supposed to be calling from, and they’ll confirm the number and location. This happens with the 000 operator, not the police/fire/ambulance operator you get transferred to in a real emergency.
Other countries may have different testing procedures.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infra...
But what happened here was, 000 calls that should have worked didn't, resulting in 4 linked death so far.
Having worked in that field a few years ago, I know that any minute in which 000 is inaccessible is a grave disaster. This was a colossal cluster f: 14 hours!
And when I was renting at a place with just VOIP, the modem had a slot for a battery to ensure the telephone remained operational when power went out.
Do neither exist in AU?
untrimmed•4mo ago
scorpioxy•4mo ago
I was in similar meetings where such decisions were made and possible consequences were brushed off with "we just need to get this done as quickly as possible".
This won't stop until there are serious consequences for the businesses.