Nuisance emergency callers face phone blocking

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 11:46

IT Industry - Strategy

People who repeatedly make non-genuine calls to Australia's triple zero emergency call number from their mobile phone now face the possibility of having it barred from making calls, except to 000, under new measures announced by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

User blocking is the latest move to stamp out what has become a growing burden on the emergency call handling service, operated by Telstra. In December 2008 the ACMA announced that all calls to 000 would be answered by a short recorded message, with the aim of persuading non-genuine callers to hang up before imposing on the emergency call operators.

Telecom New Zealand had introduced a similar system six months earlier and it resulted in a 27 percent reduction in non-genuine calls to the emergency call number, the ACMA said at the time. It now says: "Telstra has reported that since [the recorded message's] introduction, the number of calls received by Triple Zero has reduced by approximately 20 percent."

According to the ACMA, "Telstra ... received 10.3 million calls to Triple Zero in 2008-09, of which 95 percent were answered in less than 10 seconds. Sixty-three percent of calls to Triple Zero were made from mobile phones in 2008-09."

Of these 10.3 million calls, the ACMA says half do not relate to a genuine emergency situation and are not transferred to an emergency service organisation. "Non-genuine calls arise in many ways, such as from misdials, automatically generated calls from incorrectly programmed fax machines or modems, callers reporting matters that are not emergencies, and hoax and malicious calls."

However spurious calls that make it through to an operator remain a major problem. Last month AAP reported South Australia's Police and Emergency Services minister, Michael Wright, making "an urgent plea for people to stop wasting emergency service resources," by making inappropriate calls to Triple 000.

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