Ombudsman logs 27,882 country telco complaints and asks for a root and branch law review

On 13 August 2026 the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman published "Left behind: Experiences of telco consumers living in regional, rural and remote Australia", a systemic insights report built on the 27,882 complaints the office received from outside Australia's major cities across the 2025 and 2026 financial years. More than 2,000 of those complaints were read in detail. Complainants were classified using the Australian Bureau of Statistics ARIA+ remoteness index, a scheme that places Hobart in inner regional Australia and Darwin in outer regional Australia. Complaints from major cities over the same two years numbered 82,191, or 74.7 per cent of the total.

The report makes four findings. Remoteness makes ordinary faults harder to fix, because technicians are slow to arrive, appointments are cancelled and there is no shop to walk into. Mobile coverage is unreliable and falls short of what people need. Choice of technology and provider is thin, and awareness of the alternatives is thinner. Outages, planned and unplanned, create safety risks, and the report says entire townships can be stranded for weeks at a time. Its headline recommendation is a root and branch review of the telecommunications regulatory framework, which it says has grown piece by piece around each individual service type. Eleven further recommendations follow, among them pausing charges while a customer waits for a technician, individual remedies for long delays in getting a mobile service, and enforceable service standards for statutory infrastructure providers.

"Reliable telecommunications are not a luxury for these communities, they're essential infrastructure," the Ombudsman, Cynthia Gebert, said in the media release issued the same day. Her foreword in the report points to a recent nation wide Telstra outage as an illustration of what failure costs when the nearest alternative is hours away, and concedes that carriers face real difficulty building, maintaining and restoring infrastructure in sparse country.

The report lands in the middle of a live regulatory question. On 5 August 2026 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission opened an inquiry under Part 25 of the Telecommunications Act 1997 into regional mobile coverage and whether it should declare one or more wholesale mobile services, including domestic roaming and radio access network services. The inquiry is expected to run about twelve months. "The telecommunications sector is changing rapidly, with new technologies creating opportunities and challenges for mobile coverage and competition," Commissioner Anna Brakey said. The regulator says it will publish a discussion paper and hold forums in regional and remote areas, and that it is taking account of the proposed Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation, which it dates to 2027, and a coming 2 GHz spectrum allocation.

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network has been arguing for mandatory domestic roaming, and lists the obligation bill as progressing through Parliament, with submissions in October 2025, November 2025 and April 2026 pressing for reliability standards, civil penalties and temporary disaster roaming during outages.

Underneath the complaints sits a measurement problem that predates them. The 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index, produced by RMIT University, Swinburne University of Technology and Telstra and released on 3 November 2025, scores the country at 73.6 out of 100, with Access at 76.8, Affordability at 70.3 and Digital Ability at 73.6. It finds 20.6 per cent of Australians excluded or highly excluded, 9.7 per cent reliant on a mobile connection alone and a further 1.8 per cent with no connection at all. Capital cities average 75.5 against 69.6 for the rest of the country, and very remote areas sit up to 11.0 points below the national average. Tasmania records the lowest state score at 69.4 and the Australian Capital Territory the highest at 79.5. The Index rests on 3,065 households surveyed in 2024, plus 807 First Nations respondents in remote and very remote communities and 1,998 First Nations respondents elsewhere.

The Index also changed how it measures Affordability, and warns its 2025 figures are not comparable with earlier years. On the new measure, an ideal bundle of unlimited home broadband plus a phone with 61GB a month for every household member aged 13 or over costs from $161 a month for one person to $1,227 for a household of eleven or more. Households earning under $41,000 a year would need to spend more than a tenth of their income to buy it, rising to a quarter for the largest of them. Public housing residents score 44.3 on Affordability against the national 70.3.

Sources disagree on some of the numbers. The Conversation, reporting the Ombudsman's findings on 13 August 2026, put the complaint count at 26,972 rather than the 27,882 printed in the report's appendix. The Index's own summary page gives the First Nations digital inclusion gap as 16.5 points in remote areas and 22.8 points in very remote areas, while the report itself states 15.5 and 19.7 for the same comparison. Both agree the national gap is 10.5 points and that 40.9 per cent of First Nations people are digitally excluded, against Closing the Gap Target 17, which sets equality of digital inclusion by 2026 using data gathered in 2024.

What is not yet known is whether any of this changes the wiring. The outdoor mobile obligation is not yet in force, the competition inquiry will not report before the second half of 2027, and no government response to the Ombudsman's call for a root and branch review had been published at the time of writing.