A month after Telstra and the Australian Communications Authority both launched independent investigations into the death of 10-year-old Sam Boulding, who suffered a fatal asthma attack at a time when the family phone was out-of-service, the nation's incumbent carrier has finally made public the results of its inquiry.

Commissioned by Telstra and carried out by auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), it has been found that -sufficient priority had not been given to Ms Boulding's telephone service", by Telstra. However, the telco's CEO Ziggy Switkowski said the investigations -did not find any evidence of wrongdoing or reckless behaviour by any Telstra staff".

The family's plight, it appears, was in part due to adverse weather conditions, which restricted repairs to two separate faults on the family phone line. Although one preliminary fault was fixed within two days - in accordance to Telstra's Customer Service Guarantee (CSG) for rural properties - -heavy rain across NSW impacted access to the network to rectify faults which resulted in delays in installation and repair activities," according to the report. PwC also said that faults volumes also increased significantly due to the heavy rain, which prompted Telstra, in accordance to the CSG standard, to declare a service disruption for the NSW County area for the period February 1, 2002 to February 15, 2002. The two remaining faults that rendered the family's phone inoperative, it appears, fell under this exemption period.

The report stresses that faults to Telstra services recorded nationally between February 5 and February 7, 2002 were the highest recorded in any three-day period within the last 12 months, and that faults within a 100km radius of Kergunyah, Victoria - where the Boulding family lives - for the week proceeding January 6 were the highest in the last 12 months. Furthermore, rainfall in many parts of NSW, in February 2002 was significantly higher than in February 2000, 2001, 2002.

-Technically Telstra met CSG obligations for each of the three faults," the report says.

Unaware a priority family
Another key finding of the report was Ms Boulding's obliviousness to the fact that her family should have been covered by the current Telstra Community Emergency and Essential (CE&ES) Policy under which the telco is obliged to provide a priority service for individuals whose 'life, health, safety or shelter would otherwise be at risk without fully operational telecommunications service'. This ensures Telstra provides a standard better than the CSG where 'practically available', however customers must apply to for this service status and the PwC report found -no evidence" Ms Boulding was aware of the Priority service.

"In light of the overall circumstances, including the multiple medical issues relating to Ms Boulding's family members (of which Telstra became aware on the afternoon of Sam's death), the family's lack of knowledge of Telstra's priority service Policy, and the occurrence of three separate faults over 13 days, in our view sufficient priority was not given to Ms Boulding's telephone service," the report states.

However, the report goes on to say: "It is not possible to make a finding on whether, if sufficient priority had been given to Ms Boulding's telephone services, it would have had any significant impact on the uncommon combination of circumstances which occurred in this case."

The key recommendations of the PwC report were that Telstra:

• improve the service it provides to customers with a life-threatening medical condition or a family member with such a condition

• improve its ability to recognise such customers

• enhance existing processes for those customers and educate customers about the provisions that exist for customers with life threatening medical conditions, and

• improve its systems to ensure important customer information is passed on to

In line with these, Telstra CEO Ziggy Switkowski claims to have accelerated the completion of a -significantly enhanced policy for giving priority to customers with life threatening medical conditions"; has committed Telstra will undertake an -extensive and ongoing" public awareness campaign to advise customers about the policy; has -fast-tracked" a AU$100 million fault management computer system, replacing that currently operative, that will ensure important customer information is more widely available to all relevant staff ; and will bring forward a number of initiatives targeted at improving specific problems identified on Telstra's rural network.

Switkowski said PwC's key finding - that sufficient priority had not been given to Ms Boulding's telephone service - was a tragedy, which had deeply saddened everyone in Telstra.

"The death of Sam Boulding was a terrible tragedy - one that no parent should ever have to face. This report, along with valuable information from Ms Rose Boulding, have provided us with a clear direction as to what Telstra must do to improve its service," he said.

"As CEO, I take responsibility for weaknesses that have been identified with our operating policies, systems and processes and I take responsibility for leading the necessary improvements in those systems and processes. We will make every effort to ensure such a tragedy does not occur again.

Telstra has undertaken to report to Australian Communications Authority (ACA) on the progress of these initiatives every three months.

Time taken
Commenting on the time it has taken to publish the findings of the report - over a month after the fatality on February 6 - Telstra spokesperson Peter Laidlaw told ZDNet Australia: -we didn't want to pre-empt or be seen to be pre-empting the ACA report".

The minister for communications Senator Richard Alston ordered the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) to carry out an investigation into the tragedy and at the same time Telstra announced its own PwC-conducted inquiry, which it maintained at the time would be report within a week.

Laidlaw also said that during the course of the PwC investigation it became clear that more time was required. Assured the ACA's findings and recommendations had been finalised, Telstra subsequently released the report.

Up until early afternoon, the ACA was still sitting on its own report. -We've completed the investigation and arrived at a number of findings and we'll be putting some recommendations to the minister over the next few days," ACA chairman Bob Horton told ZDNet Australia last week.

However, when contacted today, a spokesperson for Senator Alston said the ACA report was yet to be received by the minister. Furthermore, -we're not putting any pressure on them [ACA]," the spokesperson added.

The ACA report will seek to uncover whether the Bouldings family tragedy is an isolated incident or signs of something "systematically wrong" at Telstra.

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