Telecommunications companies will be forced to publicly release information about outages in response to fatalities associated with network issues.
Two deaths have been linked to September's outage at Optus, which lasted almost 14 hours and affected hundreds of calls in four states and territories.
From the end of June, all telcos will be required to publish or link to registers of resolved network outages on their websites after new industry rules were handed down by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Under the rules, information must be released about every major and significant local outage that's been resolved on or after March 31.
The authority's chair Nerida O'Loughlin said the changes will help improve transparency.
"This information also improves the information available to consumers about the relative performance of their telcos," she said.
"This will complement the complaints performance data which the ACMA publishes quarterly."
Telcos will need to publish when the outage started and when services were restored, the geographic areas affected, the types and estimated number of services impacted, in addition to the cause of the outage.
The changes were made after a direction from Communications Minister Anika Wells in December.
A parliamentary inquiry is examining the Optus triple-zero outage, and is expected to hand down its final report in mid-April.
A damning independent review into the incident made 21 recommendations, with the auditor describing the failings as "inexcusable" during a parliamentary hearing.
Executives from Optus' parent company Singtel said they were "deeply sorry" for the outage.
The telco's boss Stephen Rue admitted a "culture of carelessness" had existed in the lead up to the incident.
Officials from the communications watchdog were grilled during one of the inquiry's hearings, as parliamentarians grew frustrated with the regulator's lack of questioning into a similar incident at TPG.
