Customer dies with broken landline despite asking Telstra for fix

David Littleproud is advocating for the government to revise the Universal Services Obligation with tougher sanctions for telecommunications providers that fail to meet their responsibilities.

An Australian Communications and Media Authority investigation found Telstra repeatedly failed to help vulnerable customers sign up for priority assistance.

As a condition of its carrier licence, Telstra is required to provide priority assistance to customers who have a life-threatening medical condition, fixing their landlines within 24 to 48 hours.

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However, in 740 instances Telstra was unable to locate records of assistance paperwork.

"Some of these customers were having problems with their Telstra fixed line service at the same time as dealing with significant medical issues," ACMA chair Nerida O'Loughlin said.

In one instance, a customer with a serious medical condition passed away without access to a working landline, just six days after reporting the issue to Telstra.

On the day of the incident, the customer's wife was forced to raise the alarm with neighbour, after her attempts to call emergency services on the landline failed.

Mr Littleproud said the findings were "outrageous".

"This is a matter of life and death," Mr Littleproud said.

"No vulnerable person should risk suffering a medical episode and be unable to call for help....no Australian should ever experience such helplessness or fear."

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The investigation was further proof that government intervention was needed, he said, and called for Labor to strengthen the Universal Service Obligation.

"The sooner we make changes to the USO, the safer Australians in regional and rural communities will be," Mr Littleproud said.

Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the Nationals leader was wrong to suggest the issue had something to do with the USO.

"This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the regulatory regime," Ms Rowland said.

"Unlike the USO, priority assistance is contained in Telstra's carrier licence and is now backed by court enforceable undertakings. This is a far stronger and more direct mechanism to hold Telstra to account.

"I will be monitoring the situation closely and stand ready to impose additional obligations whenever needed, but I commend the ACMA for its quick and decisive action."

Under an ACMA court-enforceable undertaking, Telstra will implement new systems to address the shortcomings in its priority assistance procedures.

Telstra customer service executive Kate Cotter said the company had dedicated teams in place to support more than 150,000 priority assistance customers, but admitted "we didn't follow our processes as carefully as we should".

"We apologise sincerely for this... we already have work under way to do better," she said.