Australia's three mobile network operators started telling customers on Monday to stay on the line for up to 60 seconds when a Triple Zero call will not connect, instead of hanging up and dialling again.
The advice has two parts. On the first attempt, if the call has not connected in about five seconds, hang up and redial. On every attempt after that, stay on the line for up to a minute. The campaign also tells people to try a landline, a public phone or Wi-Fi calling if a mobile call will not go through.
The silence callers hear in that minute is the handset doing something. Emergency camp-on is the arrangement that lets a phone place a Triple Zero call across a rival carrier's network when its own network is unavailable. Before the call can be carried, the handset has to give up on its home network, scan for another one and register on it. None of it produces a ring tone. To the person holding the phone, a handset searching for a network is indistinguishable from one that has failed.
The campaign was put together by the Australian Telecommunications Alliance, the industry body for the carriers, with Telstra, Optus and TPG Telecom and the federal Triple Zero Custodian.
ATA chief executive Luke Coleman said the three operators and the Custodian had worked on it together. "Our priority is to ensure Australians are equipped with simple advice they can recall and use in a worst-case scenario if they need to call Triple Zero and find their usual network is unavailable," he said.
The advice is not new guidance. It answers a recommendation from Dr Kerry Schott's independent review into the Optus emergency calling failure of 18 September 2025, when a routine network upgrade left Triple Zero calls uncarried for about 15 hours. The review found 605 people tried to reach Triple Zero and could not. Schott linked two deaths to the outage.
One of the 21 recommendations Schott made was that customers be told their devices may take 40 to 60 seconds to connect to Triple Zero, and that a way be built for people to test whether their own handset can reach emergency services at all. Optus accepted all 21. The review was released on 18 December 2025.
The public advice has therefore taken eleven months from the outage and eight from the report that recommended it.
The Triple Zero Custodian was set up inside the federal communications department in March 2025, after an earlier review of the 2023 Optus outage recommended it. Its functions were put into law by the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Act 2025. Working through the Australian Communications and Media Authority, it can compel carriers to hand over information about how Triple Zero is performing.
What the campaign does not do is change the network behaviour it describes. Camp-on still takes the time it takes, and a caller still cannot tell a searching handset from a dead one. The advice moves the response onto the person making the call. Schott's other recommendations, which go to Optus's own escalation and incident handling and to moving its operations centre onshore, are being implemented by the company separately.
Neither the ATA nor the Custodian has published how the campaign will reach people who are not existing postpaid customers of the three carriers, or how its reach will be measured. The second half of the Schott recommendation, a way for a customer to test their own device against the emergency call service, has not been announced.
