Date: 25 June 2025
Location: Virtual
Chair: Samantha Yorke, Authority Member and Consumer Lead
Overview
On 25 June 2025, members of the ACMA’s Consumer Consultative Forum (CCF) met for the second time in 2025 to discuss current telecommunications issues, regulatory developments and consumer protection initiatives.
At the CCF, the ACMA heard that:
- Proactive monitoring and enforcement of the obligations in the recent Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Standard is imperative; as well as making sure that people affected by domestic, family and sexual violence, and their advocates, are aware of their rights and protections. Members considered that this responsibility for education falls both to the ACMA and to telcos.
- There are still consumers who have been unable to resolve the degradation of their mobile service following the 3G network shutdown in 2024 and who are not receiving adequate support from their telcos.
- The assumptions built into the telco system that consumers generally have access to reliable power services and receive acceptable services through satellite technology is not borne out by consumer experience. This includes where telcos focus only on the duration of dropouts of a service, rather than them also considering number and frequency, in diagnosing and prioritising action for issues.
- Consumers, particularly those experiencing ongoing or persistent issues, are experiencing fatigue about reporting/complaining and just ‘giving up’. This is disproportionately impacting regional, rural and remote consumers and needs to be considered when drawing insights from complaint number trends.
- Member organisations have observed an increase in requests for assistance about financial hardship, with common themes around inappropriate sales practices or having been refused payment assistance by their telco. They also reported instances of consumers prioritising payment of telco bills over essential expenses such as food and medication.
The ACMA provided the CCF with updates on:
- our plans to prioritise monitoring compliance with the new Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Standard and work to develop guidance material for industry and consumers
- our work to update our consumer-focused web content and plan to launch a new newsletter aimed at providing consumer advocates with information to help them better assist their clients
- our upcoming publication of the quarterly telco complaints data and our work on scam prevention.