The House of Representatives passed the universal outdoor mobile obligation on Wednesday, sending to the Senate a bill that requires Telstra, Optus and TPG Telecom to make voice calls and text messages available outdoors across Australia from 1 December 2027.
All three carriers told a Senate committee in April that the voice half of that obligation will not exist by then.
The Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2026 was introduced on 27 November 2025 and read a third time on Wednesday morning. It amends the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Service Standards) Act 1999 to create an obligation that mobile coverage be reasonably available outdoors to all people in Australia on an equitable basis. The services covered are voice and SMS only. Outdoors excludes buildings, vehicles, aircraft, vessels and anywhere underground or underwater. Western Australia's Australian Radio Quiet Zone, around the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, is carved out in the statute.
The three carriers are named in the legislation itself, at section 12L. There is no size threshold to meet or fall below. Telstra Limited, Optus Mobile Pty Limited and TPG Telecom Limited are listed, and the Minister may add others by instrument.
The mechanism is satellite direct-to-device, and the gap between what is shipped and what is required is the whole story. Telstra sells a service now, through SpaceX Starlink, launched in June 2025. It told the committee in April it was carrying about 187,000 unique users a day, and said in July that daily connections had passed 200,000. It does text messages, and since late July a short list of approved apps. It does not do voice. Telstra's own product page says the service is not designed to be an emergency service and that you cannot call Triple Zero from it, nor text Triple Zero directly. Optus announced a service with SpaceX in July 2023, targeting SMS from late 2024 and voice and data from late 2025, and has launched nothing. TPG demonstrated a text message over Lynk Global's network in May 2025 and has announced nothing since.
The handset fleet is the other constraint, and it is the one that cannot be fixed by launching a satellite. Telstra's published position is that good quality voice and low speed data over satellite will require a next generation handset supporting the 3GPP non-terrestrial networks standard. Even the light data service it turned on in July runs only on iPhone 13 or newer and the Galaxy S26 family, a narrower set than the one that can send a satellite text.
Nobody anywhere sells satellite direct-to-device voice. Optus chief technology officer Sri Amirthalingam told the committee on 20 April that "carrier-grade voice, reliable nationwide coverage and fully integrated emergency calling have not yet been demonstrated, let alone at scale", that industry expects those capabilities "will not realistically commence until late 2028 at best", and that "setting a statutory obligation to commence in December 2027 is unrealistic". TPG group chief technology officer Giovanni Chiarelli said the December 2027 date was "unachievable" and that any default date "should be no earlier than 1 January 2030". Telstra's Bill Gallagher said there was "no certainty at this time on when voice will become available".
Communications Minister Anika Wells addressed that objection when she introduced the bill. "Some would say we should wait until the technology is widely available before legislating the UOMO," she said. "But to wait would mean leaving rollout decisions to industry alone, and risk some Australians being left behind."
The bill has slack built in. The 1 December 2027 date is a default day, and the Minister can postpone it by 12 months on up to three occasions, which puts the real backstop at December 2030, the date the carriers asked for. The Senate scrutiny of bills committee took a dimmer view of that flexibility, saying the delegated powers in the commencement and exemption provisions "impact on the level of parliamentary scrutiny and may subvert the appropriate relationship between the Parliament and the Executive".
The Coalition tried to send the bill back over the same problem. Its second reading amendment, moved by Melissa McIntosh, said the bill "legislates the use of technologies such as voice to satellite before it either exists at scale or is commercially available, fuelling uncertainty and raising false hope", and objected that there is no express obligation to carry Triple Zero calls. The House defeated it 52 votes to 86 on Wednesday morning, with the crossbench voting alongside the Coalition.
One amendment did get up, from independent MP Helen Haines. It requires that when the Minister makes an instrument determining where the obligation does not apply, she publish a statement explaining how those circumstances were determined and what effect they are expected to have on coverage. Haines said people in poorly served areas feared the bill contained a get out of jail free card that would let the minister exclude them because the telcos said it was all too hard in those places. Wells backed it, saying "there must be a high bar for allowing providers to avoid UOMO in specific circumstances".
Haines lost six other amendments on the voices, including one that would have inserted a temporary disaster roaming power, letting the Minister require a carrier to open its network in an emergency with wholesale terms and pricing set by rule. She said bushfires had left parts of her electorate disconnected for prolonged periods this year and that a hands-off approach was not good enough. Wells said the government recognised the importance of the issues but that the bill held "a range of powers that would achieve similar outcomes" and the amendments were "not necessary". The word roaming appears nowhere in the text the House passed.
Roaming is where the Senate fight will be, and it is already before the regulator. The ACCC opened a combined inquiry on 5 August into declaring both a domestic mobile roaming service and a radio access network service, expected to run about 12 months. It said it took into account the coming obligation and the ACMA's 2 GHz spectrum allocation. Commissioner Anna Brakey said the ACCC "will only make a declaration if it considers doing so would benefit end users (primarily consumers) over the long term". The last time it looked, in 2017, it declined, finding declaration "would not promote competition in the retail mobile services market to a significant extent".
Both senators expected to move roaming amendments have already put their positions on the record. Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young wrote in the committee report that without stronger requirements the bill "risks becoming another failed attempt at corporate self regulation in the telecommunications industry". Shadow communications minister Sarah Henderson called the bill "fundamentally flawed in its design", noted that "reasonably available" and "equitable basis" are not defined in the primary legislation, and argued mandatory roaming "represents the most effective and immediate step which can be taken to improve connectivity across regional Australia". Of Telstra's opposition to it, she said the position "reflects its commercial interests at the expense of the national interest".
A separate roaming workstream is running outside all of this. The Department of Infrastructure told the committee it is working with the carriers on temporary disaster roaming for the high-risk weather season starting 1 October, and is "exploring options to mandate TDR should the MNOs fail to deliver a TDR capability by 1 October 2026". Wells told the House on Wednesday that the capability will start from October as an industry-led initiative.
The bill creates no new penalties. Enforcement falls to ACMA under existing Telecommunications Act powers. It also does not say what any of this will cost. Public money can flow to the three named carriers through the Public Interest Telecommunications Services Special Account, the same account that pays Telstra $253 million a year for the standard telephone service and $44 million for payphones under an agreement running to 2032, both figures fixed and unindexed since 2012. Henderson's objection on that point is specific: "The Bill is silent on how much the mobile network operators will receive, the total cost to taxpayers, the exact subsidy formula."
The scale claim attached to the policy is the Minister's, not the statute's. Wells said in November the changes would "add up to 5 million square km" of outdoor coverage. The explanatory memorandum says about a third of the Australian landmass has coverage now, and Geoscience Australia puts the country at 7,688,287 square kilometres, so the figure is consistent with covering most of the remainder. It does not appear in the bill.
The bill now goes to the Senate, where it has not yet been read a first time. The ACCC inquiry it will be argued against runs into the middle of next year.
