Australian telco cut off emergency calls, firewall upgrade linked to 3 deaths

Re:Australian telco cut off emergency calls, firewall upgrad... by jstanley on Monday September 22, 2025 @04:51AM (#45330726)

I've done some work for a telco and I was surprised to find that emergency calls are routed over completely different infrastructure to ordinary calls, and it is not routinely tested.

There wasn't an automated way to test it, and most people never thought at all about the emergency call routing because it was such a low number of calls (I think single digits ever).

It's easy to see how you could accidentally break emergency calling and not notice.

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Re:Australian telco cut off emergency calls, firewall upgrad... by cmullaparthi on Monday September 22, 2025 @05:01AM (#45330804)

Not sure which telco that is - but in the UK, impact on emergency calls is taken into account for every change that happens. This was non-negotiable in the 15 years I spent at a telco.

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Re:Australian telco cut off emergency calls, firewall upgrad... by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn on Monday September 22, 2025 @04:58AM (#45330782)

In the UK, based on the latest data, we get 35 million 999/112 calls per annum, roughly 96k per day.

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Re:Australian telco cut off emergency calls, firewall upgrad... by closewith on Monday September 22, 2025 @05:02AM (#45330811)

But there's about 50,000 mobile phone towers, so still single digits per site.

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Re:Australian telco cut off emergency calls, firewall upgrad... by NewJazz on Monday September 22, 2025 @04:58AM (#45330788)

Would be wonderful if we could crowd source regular testing. Could help catch device specific issues like those on the Pikcel line of phones.

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