27 August 2026 at 10:00 CET: Emergency calls in the all-IP era: what fails, what the testing shows, and what regulators should demand – Experience from Australia
The switch-off of 2G and 3G removes a fallback that emergency calling has relied on for decades. In an all-IP environment, emergency calls can fail even when a network appears to be working normally, with issues often caused by routine software updates, configuration changes or maintenance.
Following the 2023 Optus outage, in which 2,145 emergency calls failed, Australia introduced regular end-to-end testing of the Triple Zero ecosystem. The first testing campaign showed that while emergency calls perform reliably under normal conditions, more complex network failures significantly affect call completion and connection times.
In this webinar, Ray Owen will present these findings and discuss what they mean for regulators, mobile network operators and PSAPs. He will explore why emergency call resilience cannot be measured by network uptime alone, and how end-to-end testing can help ensure networks continue to support emergency calls during the transition to 4G and 5G.
This webinar is part of EENA’s webinar series on the 2G/3G shutdown and emergency communications.
Presenting
Ray Owen
Professor Ray Owen is an Industry Professor at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), where he leads the UTS Telecom Research Institute (TRI), and serves as Principal Investigator and Director of the Australian National Telecom Resilience Centre (NTRC). With over 35 years of global telecommunications experience — including roles as CTO of NBN Co and VP & Managing Director at Nokia Australia — he brings deep industry expertise to applied research in network resilience, broadband technology, and telecommunications innovation.
The TRU, which he leads, is a wholly industry-funded research unit supported by major partners including Telstra, NBN Co, Amplitel, and the Australian Government. Its work spans emergency calling reliability, fixed-line and LEO networking, power backup, and security. Beyond UTS, Professor Owen consults internationally on telecommunications technology and network resilience, and is a recognised subject-matter expert with globally respected firms including A.T. Kearney and Tech Audit Partners. His recent publications cover areas such as AI-driven network condition assessment, generative AI’s impact on network traffic, and soft robotics for underground broadband infrastructure.
