STRIM warns of Golden Bay telecoms resilience gaps

STRIM has submitted feedback to the Commerce Commission on telecommunications resilience, drawing on community evidence gathered after a power outage in Golden Bay.

The community-led advocacy group's 16-page submission responds to the regulator's draft guidance on resilience principles for infrastructure investment decisions. It grew out of concerns about what communications residents could still rely on if the route serving Golden Bay failed, particularly for access to 111.

The evidence centres on a planned power outage that lasted more than seven hours at STRIM's Pōhara observation point. The group received 56 anonymised reports from more than 20 localities, 41 of which described telecommunications problems.

Those reports included 11 accounts of phones showing bars or 4G while ordinary communications were not working reliably. Another 12 described services that remained failed or materially degraded after household power returned, while four people reported that expected satellite fallback did not activate or switch on.

STRIM said its evidence could not establish the technical cause of those experiences. It argued, however, that backup batteries at cell sites do not by themselves resolve wider resilience issues if a working path into the broader network is lost.

Single failures

The submission points to repeated disruption on the fibre route serving Golden Bay. STRIM said the route has been damaged three times since 2022, including a severance in July 2025 that was publicly reported as affecting mobile and internet services, as well as access to 111.

The filing also raises questions about how emergency roaming works during some outages. STRIM said Telecommunications Forum operational material recognises situations in which a handset remains attached to its home network even though calls cannot be made, meaning emergency roaming may not occur while radio coverage is still present.

The submission also cites international emergency communications research. STRIM said the European Emergency Number Association has warned that devices, mobile networks and emergency call centres are often not tested together under realistic conditions, leaving some faults undiscovered until a real emergency.

The group places its local evidence within a broader national debate over emergency calling resilience. It referred to a white paper prepared by NECWG-A/NZ, with contributions from NZ Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, Hato Hone St John and Wellington Free Ambulance, which described the emergency contact framework as fragmented and lacking central governance and performance accountability.

According to STRIM, that paper found that more than 89% of 111 calls are now made from mobile phones. It also said backup battery power at many cell towers may provide only about two hours of emergency power, and recorded instances during ex-Tropical Cyclone Tam in Northland where several cell-site batteries ran out after about two hours, leaving many people unable to make 111 calls or receive emergency alerts.

Shelley Grell, spokesperson for STRIM, said the issues raised by the Golden Bay outage were not new.

"What struck us is that these are not obscure or newly discovered risks.

"National emergency services work has already identified problems with resilience, outage visibility, governance and accountability. Our Golden Bay evidence shows what those system-level concerns can look like for ordinary people on the ground."

Investment test

STRIM is asking the Commerce Commission to frame resilience investment around a defined outcome for communities when a route or backhaul path fails. In its submission, the group said the key question should be what minimum telecommunications service remains available, or can be restored within a set period, after such a failure.

Grell said the group was not advocating for a single technical solution.

"We are not asking the Commission to prescribe one technology.

"We are asking that real resilience means a community still has a genuinely usable path to essential communications - not just apparent signal, a powered tower or another brand that shares the same point of failure."

STRIM said its evidence report is based on a self-selected community call-out and direct accounts rather than a scientific coverage survey. It said the material should not be used to rank providers or estimate the share of Golden Bay residents affected, and noted that no contributor reported making a 111 call during the outage.

The group does not claim that any particular 111 call would have failed during the incident. Instead, its case to the regulator focuses on what local residents experienced when visible mobile signal did not consistently translate into reliable communications.

As presented by STRIM, Golden Bay's experience highlights a gap between the appearance of service and the ability to use it when power and network links come under strain.