Why This Needs Saying Out Loud
There is a category of workplace knowledge that only ever matters once, and only ever matters to whoever happens to be holding the phone. Emergency calling is the purest example. It is also the category where written procedures perform worst, because nobody consults a procedure manual while somebody is on the floor.
So the test for this article is not whether it is accurate. It is whether, after reading it, you can walk out and say the right thing to your team in half a minute. Everything below is built for that.
~5s
First attempt — then hang up
60s
Hold on the second attempt
0
Sounds you will hear while it works
30s
How long the briefing takes
A procedure nobody has heard aloud is not a control. It is a document.
— the entire argument for this article
The Thirty-Second Script
Read this at a shift handover, a toolbox talk, a team meeting or a smoko. Do not paraphrase it the first time — the numbers are the content.
Say this
“Quick one about calling triple zero. If you ever have to ring 000 and nothing happens — no ringing, no voice, just silence — that is normal now. Your phone is trying to get the call out through a different carrier's network, and that takes time.
So: dial 000, count to five. If nothing has happened, hang up and dial again straight away. On that second call, stay on the line for a full minute even though it sounds dead. Do not hang up. The silence means it is working.
And before you dial, glance at the top of your screen. If it says SOS, or emergency calls only, the call can get out. If it just says no service, there is no coverage here at all — use the desk phone or move somewhere with signal.
There is a card on the wall by the first aid kit with our address on it. Read the address off the card, do not try to remember it.”
That is it. Four instructions and a pointer to a card. If you deliver nothing else from this article, deliver that.
The Card to Print
Above the first aid kit. In each vehicle. Behind reception. In the staff room. Written to be read aloud by somebody whose hands are not steady.
CALLING 000 — WHAT TO EXPECT
1. Dial 000. Count to five.
2. Nothing happening? Hang up. Dial again immediately.
3. Second call: stay on for up to ONE MINUTE. It will be silent. DO NOT HANG UP.
4. Screen says SOS / SOS only / Emergency calls only → the call can get out.
5. Screen says only NO SERVICE → no coverage here. Use a desk phone or move.
6. OUR ADDRESS: ______________________________________
7. HOW TO GET IN: _____________________________________
(gate / unit number / which street the driveway is on / gate code / who has the key)
Lines six and seven are the ones that get skipped and they are the reason the card exists. Everybody knows their own address on an ordinary Tuesday. Under adrenaline, in a shed, at night, with somebody shouting, a printed address that can be read out loud beats a remembered one every single time. Fill them in with a pen before you put the card up. A blank card on a wall is decoration.
What the Silence Actually Is
Staff follow instructions better when they know the reason, so it is worth being able to explain this in one breath if somebody asks.
When you dial Triple Zero, your handset does not simply hand the call to your own carrier and give up if that fails. If your carrier's network is unavailable where you are — outside coverage, or during an outage — the handset tries to place the emergency call through any other carrier network it can find. Finding a network, choosing one, and setting up a call through a carrier you have no account with takes time. That negotiation is the silence.
It does not need credit
A prepaid handset with nothing on it still reaches Triple Zero. Payment status is irrelevant to an emergency call.
It does not need an active service
A cancelled or suspended service still places emergency calls. The old phone nobody uses is not dead weight.
It does not even need a SIM
No SIM, no account, no carrier relationship — the emergency call is still attempted. This is why a charged old handset in a remote vehicle is a genuine, free safety control.
But it does need time
Published advice says up to sixty seconds. During an outage earlier this year, the maximum reportedly stretched to ninety. Sixty is what to expect, not a guaranteed ceiling — so the instruction is to keep holding, not to time it.
The honest framing
Camp-on was built primarily for the ordinary Australian situation of being outside your own network's coverage, which is a genuine and constant problem in this country. It was not designed as a remedy for an entire metropolitan network failing simultaneously, which is a completely different load. That is not a criticism of the mechanism — it is well-engineered for its purpose — but it does explain why it behaves the way it does during a large outage, and why the sensible response is to tell people what to expect rather than to pretend the delay is not there.
Teach the Screen Check First
If you can only get one thing into somebody's head, make it this rather than the timing. The handset tells you whether an emergency call is possible before you dial. One glance, one second.
| Screen shows | Where | Meaning | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| SOS or SOS only | iPhone — wording varies by iOS version | Camp-on available | Dial. Expect the silence. Hold. |
| Emergency calls only | Android | Camp-on available | Dial. Expect the silence. Hold. |
| No service – emergency calls only | Android | Camp-on available — note the words after the dash | Dial. Expect the silence. Hold. |
| Small SOS icon | Android | Camp-on available | Dial. Expect the silence. Hold. |
| No service and nothing else | Both | No mobile coverage at all | Do not persist. Use a fixed line, or move to where there is signal. |
The distinction that does the work
“No service – emergency calls only” and “no service” look almost identical on a small screen under stress, and they mean opposite things. One says the call can get out through somebody else's network. The other says there is nothing here at all. Teach people to read to the end of the line. The published advice is unambiguous on the second case: if your phone shows no service, there is no mobile network coverage available where you are and you will not be able to call 000 using a mobile network.
Where there is genuinely no coverage, the fallbacks are a landline or fixed service, or a call over an available Wi-Fi network using Wi-Fi calling. Treat Wi-Fi calling as a maybe, not a plan. Emergency call support over Wi-Fi varies by carrier and by device in Australia, and an emergency is the wrong moment to find out which side of the variation your handsets sit on. Test it, on the actual phones your staff carry, this week.
Why the Order of the Two Instructions Matters
Somebody will push back on the advice, because everything anyone has ever been told about emergency calls is do not hang up. Being able to answer that objection is what makes the briefing stick.
| Attempt one: five seconds, then hang up | Attempt two: hold for sixty | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is testing | Whether your own network is fine and will connect you normally | Whether camp-on can find a path through another carrier |
| Why so short / so long | A normal connection is fast. Five seconds of nothing means something is wrong, and waiting does not repair it. | Camp-on genuinely needs that long, and hanging up mid-way restarts it from zero. |
| The mistake it prevents | Burning a minute on an attempt that was never going to succeed | Abandoning at forty seconds an attempt that would have connected at fifty |
The one-line answer to the objection: the first call is a quick check, the second call is the real one. The instinctive behaviour — hang up at thirty seconds, try again, hang up at thirty seconds, try again — is the worst possible pattern, because it repeatedly interrupts the exact process that needed to be left alone. Until today, nobody had been told otherwise, which is precisely why the campaign exists.
Who Needs What: A Role-by-Role Briefing
Not everybody needs the same version. Five minutes spent matching the message to the role is worth more than a policy update nobody opens.
| Role | The part that matters most for them |
|---|---|
| Reception and front of house | They will most likely call from a desk phone, which does not use camp-on at all. Their critical item is the address and access notes, read off the card rather than recalled. |
| Field crews and drivers | The screen check, because they move through marginal coverage all day. Plus a charged old handset in the vehicle, which works with no SIM. |
| Lone workers | Everything, and in person. The difference between SOS only and no service is the difference between being able to summon help and not. |
| After-hours and single-staffed shifts | The card must be within arm's reach of where they actually work at 9pm, not in a locked office. Check this physically. |
| Staff working from home | Call from the mobile, not the softphone. A softphone extension presents the office address, and an ambulance sent to your office is worse than useless. Nobody guesses this — say it. |
| Managers and supervisors | The four broken things in the next section. Those are theirs to fix, and none of them can be fixed by a staff member. |
Four Things in Your Business That Are Probably Wrong
The briefing is free and takes half a minute. These four take a bit longer and are worth more.
1. A registered address that is stale or useless
The business moved, or a second site was provisioned against the first site's address, or the address is correct but unusable — a business park with no unit number, a rural block with no street number, an entrance on a different road. This is the expensive one.
2. Remote staff on office-registered extensions
Softphones registered to a site nobody attends. Harmless until somebody at home reaches for the app instead of their mobile.
3. An emergency procedure that says "call 000" and stops
Which is almost every emergency procedure in Australia. It is now missing the two numbers that determine whether the call connects. A one-line amendment.
4. Nobody has written down how to get in
Gate code, boom gate, which driveway, who holds the key, whether the roller door is the only access after six. Ambulances have been delayed by all five.
Your Fixed and Cloud Lines Follow a Different Path
Worth stating carefully rather than triumphantly, because the temptation to oversell here is obvious and we would rather not.
Camp-on is a mobile network mechanism. It exists because a mobile can see several carrier networks and must pick one. A Triple Zero call from a fixed service or a cloud phone system does not use camp-on and does not carry the sixty-second silence — it uses the emergency routing of the service it is on.
| Mobile handset | Fixed or cloud service | |
|---|---|---|
| Camp-on applies? | Yes, when its own network is unavailable | No |
| Sixty seconds of silence? | Yes | No |
| Depends on | Mobile coverage at your exact location | The fixed connection at the site |
| Location given to the operator | Approximate, from network and handset | The registered service address — hence the fuss about it |
| What breaks it | No coverage, or an outage with no other carrier reachable | Site internet down with no diversion configured |
The conclusion is not that one is safer. It is that they break for different reasons, which is the entire definition of redundancy. A mobile is what is in your hand in a paddock. A fixed service is what does not care that three carriers are having a bad afternoon. Two things that fail for the same reason are one thing. Have both, and make sure your staff know which to reach for in which situation — that second half is the part businesses skip.
The Address Is the One That Costs Minutes
If this article were allowed one recommendation, it would not be the wall card. It would be this.
When an emergency call comes from a fixed or cloud service, the location the operator sees comes from the registered service address. Wrong address, wrong location, and the caller — possibly doing CPR — has to correct it out loud. Every second of that correction is a second not spent on the patient.
- Ask your provider what address is registered against each service and each site. If they cannot answer promptly, that is a finding in itself and worth acting on.
- Check it is the address of the building the phone is actually in — not head office, not the accountant, not the address on the invoice.
- Add the access detail in writing. Unit number, which gate, which street the driveway is on, gate code, whether there is a boom, who holds the key after hours.
- Write it on the wall card. Both the address and the access notes, in pen, before the card goes up.
- Brief the remote workers separately. Mobile, not softphone, from home. Say it explicitly and say it more than once.
What Not to Rely On This Summer
One related item is being discussed as though it were available. It is not.
Temporary Disaster Roaming
TDR would let mobile users roam onto another carrier's network during extended disruptions from severe weather, bushfires or floods — for ordinary calls, not just emergency ones, which is what makes it different from camp-on. Trials are running, and the coming disaster season will be its first operational test. But the carriers have not yet agreed activation thresholds or finalised how it will operate, with the Department describing operational details as being carefully worked through with stakeholders. Treat it as a development to watch, not a control to plan around. Anyone presenting it as an available capability this season is ahead of the facts.
Make It Stick: A Ten-Minute Drill
Briefings decay. A drill does not, because people remember doing things.
- Minute one. Deliver the thirty-second script. Do not hand out paper first.
- Minutes two to four. Everybody takes out their own phone and finds where the signal indicator is. Ask what it says right now. Most people have genuinely never looked.
- Minutes five and six. Walk to the wall card. Have somebody read the address and access notes out loud. If either line is blank, fill it in now while everyone is watching.
- Minutes seven and eight. Ask the question: “you're at home and something happens — which phone do you use?” The correct answer is the mobile. Correct anyone who says the work app.
- Minutes nine and ten. Ask where the nearest desk phone is, and where the nearest spot with reliable mobile signal is if the answer is nowhere. On some sites this produces a surprise, and the surprise is the point.
The summary
Five seconds, hang up, redial, then hold for a full minute in silence. Read the screen first: SOS or emergency calls only means the call can get out; plain no service means it cannot. Camp-on needs no credit, no service and no SIM, so a charged old handset in a vehicle is free insurance. None of it applies to your fixed or cloud lines, which break for different reasons — and that is the argument for having both, not for preferring one. Then go and check the address registered against your services, because that is the item that actually costs minutes. The briefing takes thirty seconds. Do it today rather than adding it to a list.
Related reading: how Triple Zero works from a cloud phone system, the outage behind the review and the custodian, why redundancy on one network is not redundancy, working outside the coverage map, and emergency alerts reaching your staff.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should I tell my staff about the new 000 advice?
Deliver four instructions out loud at a shift handover, toolbox talk or team meeting, and do not paraphrase them the first time because the numbers are the content. One: if you dial 000 and hear nothing at all, that is normal — your phone is trying to get the call out through a different carrier's network and it takes time. Two: dial 000 and count to five; if nothing has happened, hang up and dial again straight away. Three: on that second call, stay on the line for a full minute even though it sounds dead, and do not hang up, because the silence means it is working. Four: before you dial, glance at the top of your screen — if it says SOS or emergency calls only the call can get out, and if it says only no service then there is no coverage at all and you need a desk phone or a different location. Then point at the card on the wall and tell them to read the address off it rather than trying to remember it under pressure. The whole briefing takes about thirty seconds. It is worth doing verbally rather than by email, because emergency knowledge only ever matters once and only to whoever happens to be holding the phone, and nobody reads a procedure document while somebody is on the floor.
Why does a Triple Zero call go silent for up to a minute?
Because of emergency camp-on. When you dial 000, your handset does not simply hand the call to your own carrier and give up if that fails; if your carrier's network is unavailable where you are, either because you are outside its coverage or because it is having an outage, the handset attempts to place the emergency call through any other carrier network it can detect. Finding the available networks, selecting one and establishing a call through a carrier you have no account with all takes time, and that negotiation is the silence — no ringing, no recorded message, nothing. Advice published on 24 August 2026 by the federal government and the mobile carriers states the process can take up to sixty seconds and that there will generally be silence while it happens; during a Telstra outage in early July 2026 the maximum reportedly stretched to ninety seconds, so sixty is what to expect rather than a guaranteed ceiling. Camp-on is genuinely good engineering and it works with no credit on the service, with a cancelled or suspended service, and even with no SIM card at all. It was designed principally for the ordinary Australian situation of being outside your own network's coverage rather than as a remedy for an entire metropolitan network failing at once, which explains its behaviour during a large outage.
What is the difference between no service and emergency calls only on my phone?
They look nearly identical on a small screen under stress and they mean opposite things, which is why teaching people to read to the end of the line is the most useful single item in this whole subject. SOS, SOS only, Emergency calls only, No service – emergency calls only, or a small SOS icon all mean the same thing: emergency camp-on is available, so a Triple Zero call can be placed through another carrier's network even though your own is not usable. In that situation you should dial, expect the silence, and hold. A plain no service display with nothing after it means something entirely different — there is no mobile network coverage available where you are at all, and the published advice states directly that you will not be able to call 000 using a mobile network from that location. Persisting is pointless. The alternatives are a landline or fixed service, or a call over an available Wi-Fi network using Wi-Fi calling, and that last option should be treated as a possibility to test in advance rather than a plan, because emergency call support over Wi-Fi varies by carrier and by device in Australia. Teach the screen check before the dialling procedure: it takes one second, and it determines which method will work at all.
Should staff working from home call 000 from the work app or their mobile?
Their mobile, always, and this needs to be said explicitly because nobody guesses it. A softphone or work app extension is registered against a service address, and for most remote workers that address is the office — a building they may not have attended in years. If an emergency call is placed from that extension, the location information available to the operator points at the office rather than at the house where the emergency is happening, and an ambulance dispatched to your office is worse than useless because it consumes the minutes that mattered. A mobile handset, by contrast, gives an approximate location derived from the network and the handset itself, which is imperfect but is at least in the right suburb. So the instruction for anyone working outside the office is simple: in an emergency at home, use the mobile. This is also worth checking at the administrative level rather than relying on staff behaviour: ask your provider which address is registered against each extension, and be aware that remote workers frequently sit on extensions still tied to a site nobody visits. It is harmless right up until the moment somebody at home reaches for the app out of habit, which is exactly the moment habits take over from instructions.
Does the 000 delay apply to calls from a desk phone or cloud phone system?
No. Camp-on is specifically a mobile network mechanism, existing because a mobile handset can detect several carrier networks and has to choose between them. A Triple Zero call placed from a fixed service or a cloud phone system does not use camp-on at all and does not carry the sixty-second silence; it uses the emergency call routing of the service it is on. That is a genuine reason to have a fixed or cloud service alongside mobiles, but the honest conclusion is not that one is safer than the other — it is that they break for different reasons, which is the actual definition of redundancy. A mobile depends entirely on mobile coverage at your precise location and on at least one carrier network being reachable, and gives the operator only an approximate position. A fixed or cloud service depends on the internet connection at the site and on a diversion being configured for when that connection fails, and presents your registered service address, which is why that address being correct and findable matters so much. Two services that fail for the same reason are really one service. Have both, and make sure staff know which to reach for in which situation, because that second half is what businesses consistently skip.
How do I make sure emergency services can find my premises?
Treat it as five concrete steps rather than an assumption, because this is the item that actually costs minutes and it is broken in a surprising number of businesses. First, ask your provider what address is registered against each service and each site — and if they cannot tell you promptly, treat that as a finding worth acting on. Second, confirm it is the address of the building the phone is physically in, rather than head office, the accountant's office or whatever appears on the invoice; the common failure is a second site provisioned against the first site's address. Third, add the access detail in writing, because a technically correct address is often practically useless: a business park with fourteen units and no unit number, a rural property with no street number, a site whose real entrance is on a different road, a locked boom gate after six, or a roller door that is the only way in at night. Fourth, write both the address and the access notes onto the printed wall card in pen before the card goes up, since a blank card is decoration and a remembered address performs badly under adrenaline. Fifth, brief remote workers separately to use their mobile rather than a softphone registered to the office. None of this costs anything and it is the highest-value half hour available.
Can my business rely on Temporary Disaster Roaming this disaster season?
No, and it is worth being clear about that because it is being discussed as though it were already available. Temporary Disaster Roaming would allow mobile users to roam onto another carrier's network during extended service disruptions caused by severe weather, bushfires or floods — importantly for ordinary calls rather than only emergency ones, which is what distinguishes it from camp-on. Trials are under way and the coming disaster season will be its first operational test. However the carriers have not yet agreed activation thresholds, meaning the conditions under which it would switch on, and have not finalised how the system will operate, with the Department describing the operational details as being carefully worked through with stakeholders. That is a fair description of an unfinished arrangement rather than a criticism, since coordinating something like this across competing carriers is genuinely difficult. For continuity planning the implication is straightforward: treat TDR as a promising development worth watching rather than a control you can build a plan around, and be sceptical of any provider presenting it as a current capability. What you can rely on this season is what already exists — camp-on for emergency calls, a fixed service that fails for different reasons than mobile, configured diversions for when a site goes dark, and staff who have actually heard the five-second and sixty-second rule.
