Date: 12 November 2025
Location: ACMA Melbourne Office and via MS Teams
Chair: Samantha Yorke, Authority Member and Consumer Lead
Overview
On 12 November 2025, members of the ACMA’s Consumer Consultative Forum (CCF) met for the third time in 2025 to discuss key telecommunications issues, regulatory developments and consumer protection initiatives.
At the CCF, the ACMA heard that:
- Network resilience during natural disasters continues to be a major concern, particularly in rural and remote areas. Members highlighted that the cost and complexity of backup power solutions, the length of repair time and the isolation left these consumers especially vulnerable.
- Consumers face growing complexity in managing evolving technologies, with members emphasising the need for practical resources and industry support programs on connectivity literacy as distinct from digital literacy.
- Member organisations are still encountering concerning credit assessments, aggressive debt collection, and mis-selling practices among telcos when it comes to dealings with vulnerable consumers. They provided case studies showing particularly detrimental impacts of these practices on people experiencing family violence, those in financial hardship and people with a disability.
- Consumers are continuing to report loss of coverage and unusable coverage following the 3G shutdown. Members stressed the need for accurate coverage maps and raised concerns about misleading advice pushing consumers toward satellite services and lack of timely copper line repairs.
- Consumer fatigue, particularly in regional and remote communities, persists, with people giving up on complaints due to repeated unresolved issues.
The CCF welcomed a guest speaker from the Regional Tech Hub, who gave members an outline of its role in improving connectivity literacy and supporting regional consumers through tailored advice, troubleshooting and outreach programs.
The ACMA provided the CCF with updates on:
- Triple Zero access and resilience, including recent regulatory changes requiring mobile network operators to facilitate calls moving to other networks during outages, enhanced outage notification obligations and investigations into the September Optus outage
- compliance work on the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Standard and financial hardship obligations, including audits of telco websites and investigations informed by member case studies.