The head of the Telecommunications Forum wants the Government to look at prioritising upgrades to the 111 emergency phone-line.
Along with mobile and internet coverage, the service was lost in Golden Bay for most of the day on Thursday, after a slip cut a fibreoptic cable.
Eight-hundred fibre connections and 350 copper phone-line connections were brought down in the morning, and repairs to the cable weren’t completed until mid-afternoon. All but 20 copper connections had been restored by 4.45pm and were confirmed restored less than an hour later.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment said extreme weather could impact communications networks.
“Telecommunications providers are working hard to restore the services that have been impacted,” it said. “Technicians are on the ground to repair telecommunications equipment that has been damaged and generators are being deployed to the area to serve as a back-up power supply.”
Emergency line ‘just a phone call’
Telecommunications Forum chief executive Paul Brislen told RNZ the loss of the 111 emergency contact service was nothing new.
“111 isn’t a separate network, it is simply a phone number on the phone network,” he said. “It is carried in a slightly different way to all other phone numbers, but it is just a phone call.”
People caught without service had a range of options.
“The 111-calling connection is quite smart, so even if your phone says you’ve got no signal, if you need to make an emergency call, you should absolutely try,” Brislen said.
“What it’ll do is find any network, so if you’re with Spark or One or 2degrees, and that network isn’t available, it will find one of the others. It’ll even connect via Wi-Fi to a landline connection, if you have Wi-Fi calling capability on your phone.”
However, if the call failed, the whole network was likely down and people should try something else, instead of calling again.
“As has always been the case, you move to a place where there is a phone that you can use,” Brislen said. “In the old days, before mobile, that meant driving over the road to somebody else or going next door, or heading into town, if you were remote.
“With mobile service, of course, quite often, you can find connectivity at the top of the hill or not too far away.”
Tasman Civil Defence urged those who could not connect to 111 to travel to the nearest police or fire station.
Emergency line needs upgrading
Brislen said the 111 emergency line needed upgrading, particularly its ability to receive messages other than voice calls.
“In this day and age, you’ve got a lot of devices that will make contact with the call centre,” he said. “Various car models will call, if they have an accident.
“If you drop your phone, when you’re on your motorbike, it will ring for help — that kind of thing happens all the time.
“We’ve got this whole new wave of modern technology coming through, being used already by consumers, and it’s very hard for the call centre to accept those inputs. Text messaging would be an absolute case in point — sometimes you’re not able to make a phone call, but a text message will get through.”
He said the problem was not needing higher speeds but rather upgrading the police-led call centre.
Police documents last year revealed the outdated system caused deaths and injuries. The previous Labour government in August 2023 scrapped a project to replace it and the coalition has so far declined to restart it.
Brislen said an upgrade would be a “very complex and very expensive programme of work”.
“I’d encourage the government to have a look at prioritising that and making the call centre into more of a ‘contact centre’, so that you can communicate more directly with emergency services, when you need to.
“Making the decision to spend the money on a call centre for police may or may not be seen as frontline [or] vitally important, but I think probably we’re reaching the point now, where you have to say it absolutely is.”
RNZ has sought comment from Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell.
Better connectivity on the way
On the upside, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment said the phone networks were bringing in new technology to connect via satellite, saying this would “significantly improve the resilience of telecommunications networks”.
“All the mobile network operators are working with satellite operators to deliver satellite-to-mobile voice calling, allowing ongoing connectivity even when terrestrial networks are down.”
Brislen said the low-Earth orbit satellite technology would hopefully allow text messages and voice calls, via satellite, direct from a mobile phone, which was “sort of the golden egg… the holy grail of these things.
“Starlink, for example, is one of the early players in that market,” he said. “You’d be able to get a call up to a satellite or bounce a call off the satellite, even if you’ve got problems with the equipment on the ground in many cases.
“That is really incredibly useful in events like this.
“In that scenario, you should be able to make an emergency call from anywhere you’ve got clear line of sight with the sky.”
Telecommunications network companies like Chorus were constantly upgrading cables and particularly the fibre networks.
“They now are looking at a programme of work,” he said. “Instead of a point-to-point connecting to cities, you do a loop, so if half the cable is knocked out, for example, all the traffic is connected via the other side of the cable.”
The companies had provided a resilient and reliable network as part of their business model, and Brislen said they took that role “very seriously”.
“The key is to have multiple different types of networks that don’t have a single point of failure. We’ve got four in New Zealand — we’ve got fibre, mobile, fixed wireless connections and now this new one of satellite.
“No one single technology is perfect for all situations, but having that mix of four different technologies means, hopefully, one way or another, the call will get through.”
Copper phone-lines ‘had its day’
Brislen rejected the suggestion copper lines networks were still needed, noting New Zealand would phase them out “by the end of the decade”.
“It’s not very resilient at all,” he said. “It is seven times more likely to be damaged in an event.
“How copper lines work, you’re sending an electrical signal up and down them, and when that gets wet, it basically short-circuits the entire connection, so they’re very, very prone to breaks, they’re very prone to damage during a weather event, in particular.
“They cost more to repair and they take longer to repair as well, so all around the world, copper is being phased out. It’s had its day and it really just doesn’t deliver any of the things we need.
“It’s not fast enough, it’s not mobile enough and it’s not resilient enough.”
rnz.co.nz
