Telcos such as Optus and Telstra will be forced to keep a public register of any outages affecting their networks in real time as the Albanese government moves to improve Australians’ confidence in the Triple Zero system.

The real-time register is yet to be designed but could operate similarly to the way energy companies provide live information and maps about outages on their websites.

Communications Minister Anika Wells wrote to the regulator on Monday with a formal direction that it must beef up transparency measures and require telcos to keep a public register of network outages.

Her instruction to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) comes after three people died when at least 600 Triple Zero calls failed in Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Te

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