NBN could create a multi-million battery environmental headache

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 11:49

IT Industry - Strategy

According to a current ACMA fact sheet on telephones and power failure  "ACMA recommends that telephones be able to support access to emergency numbers (such as 000) for at least 30 minutes during a power failure. For telephones that don't function during a power failure, the technical standard suggests that a warning notice be included in the instructions, advising users that the phone won't operate if there is a power failure."

And IN a paper prepared for ACIF, the forerunner of Communications Alliance, back in 2004, Mark Armstrong of Network Insights noted "There is no current regulatory requirement for a handset or service to maintain emergency power, whether via battery backup or other means. There is a widespread belief that emergency power is a regulatory obligation."

However in a joint 2008 paper in Communications Infrastructure and Services Availability in Australia 2008, ACMA and the ACCC said: "An FTTH voice service cannot receive remote power through a telephone line so battery backup in the home is required to maintain a connection when there is a power outage."

When iTWire suggested to Quigley that there was no mandatory requirement for lifeline(ie battery backed-up_ telephone services over the NBN and that the very high penetration of mobile phones rendered these unnecessary, he said: "If there's a policy decision that says that the lifeline requirement [can be met by] people having a mobile phone, that would be good news because...it's a big issue for us...An outcome that would say there was a way to avoid putting large numbers of batteries in ONTs around the country would certainly be the right environmental outcome."