How to Choose a Business Telco: What the Complaint Data Says Really Goes Wrong

Key Takeaways

• Businesses compare providers on price, inclusions and advertised speed, because those are the easy things to compare. They're rarely what causes the frustration later.
• Australia's national complaint data points to a different culprit: no action or delayed action by the provider was the single most common issue, with 34,770 complaints in 2024-25.
• The next two issues follow the same theme rather than a technical one: disputed service and equipment fees, and services that simply stopped working.
• Complaints from people re-contacting because their problem was never actually resolved rose 36.9 per cent, which says more about follow-through than about networks.
• The questions that predict your experience are about responsiveness: who answers, whether they can act, what happens after hours, and what you're locked into.
• We publish this as a telco, deliberately. The same questions should be put to us.

Most businesses choose a telco on price, plan inclusions and advertised speed. Then they spend the next three years frustrated about something else entirely.

It's worth asking why that happens so consistently, because the answer is available. Every dispute that gets escalated past a provider in Australia is recorded by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, and the annual figures amount to a national list of the ways telcos let their customers down, in order. Read it before you sign anything, and you'll compare providers on quite different criteria.

Why we're publishing this

We're a telco. Writing about our own industry's complaint record isn't the obvious marketing move, and plenty of providers would rather these numbers stayed in an annual report nobody opens. We think it's information you need before you choose a provider - any provider, us included. If the questions further down are the right ones to put to a telco, they're the right ones to put to us.

What the National Data Actually Measures

In 2024-25 the Ombudsman received 57,592 complaints, up 1.6 per cent on the year before. Residential customers made 89 per cent of them, and 11 per cent came from small businesses - roughly one in nine, from a group with far less time to spend chasing a provider than a household has.

Those are only the disputes that escalated: serious enough that someone gave up on their provider entirely and took it further. For every one of them, plenty more were simply endured.

The Number One Problem Isn't Price or Speed

Here's the finding that should reshape how you evaluate a provider. The most common issue was not billing shock, not slow internet, not coverage.

It was "no or delayed action by a provider": 34,770 complaints.

That's the category for a telco that acknowledged the problem and then did nothing. The ticket that goes quiet. The callback that never comes. The fault that stays open for weeks while you ring back and start again with someone new.

The two issues immediately behind it follow the same theme rather than a technical one:

1. No or delayed action by the provider (34,770 complaints)
2. Service and equipment fees - charges the customer disputes or doesn't understand
3. No phone or internet service at all

And reinforcing the point: complaints from people who had to re-contact because their issue was never resolved rose 36.9 per cent. Not new problems. Old problems that were supposedly already handled.

The conclusion is uncomfortable but useful. The most common failure in Australian telecommunications is not a network failure. It's a follow-through failure.

Reliability Beats Headline Speed

The second lesson in the data is about consistency rather than peak performance. A meaningful share of complaints come down to a service that works most of the time: intermittent connections, dropouts mid-call, a connection that degrades at the worst moment.

For a business, a dropout isn't an inconvenience. It's a call with a customer ending mid-sentence, and it's worth reading alongside our piece on the real cost of missed business calls.

That's why the useful question isn't "what speed do I get?" but "what happens on the day it doesn't work?" A provider that has a real answer to the second question is worth more than one with a better number against the first.

The Questions That Actually Predict Your Experience

If the dominant failure mode is a provider not acting, the usual comparison checklist is measuring the wrong things. Speed tiers and per-minute rates are easy to compare, which is exactly why everyone compares them. Service quality is harder to compare, and it's what determines whether you're happy in year two.

Worth asking any provider before you sign:

• Who actually answers when something breaks? Ask whether support is Australian-based, and whether you'll speak to someone who can act, or someone whose job is to log a ticket.
• Will I deal with the same people? Customers re-explaining the same problem to a new person each time is a documented pattern, not bad luck. A provider that knows your account is a genuinely different experience.
• What happens to a fault after hours? Faults don't respect business hours, and neither do your customers' calls.
• Can I see the whole bill in plain terms? Disputed fees are the second most common complaint category in the country. Ask what isn't included, what's charged per use, and what happens if you go over.
• What am I locked into? A contract is only a problem when the service is bad, which is exactly when you're stuck with it. No lock-in contracts change the incentive: a provider that has to keep earning your business every month behaves differently.
• How do I leave if it doesn't work out? A confident answer here tells you a great deal. Your numbers are portable either way, as our guide to porting a business number explains.

Build Some Resilience Into Your Own Setup

You can't control any provider's response times, but you can reduce what a single failure costs you.

• Don't let one connection carry everything. If your calls run over the internet, plan for what happens when that connection drops - mobile failover, or automatic redirection so calls keep landing somewhere useful. Our phone system and SIP trunking setups are designed with that in mind.
• Make sure calls are always answered. An AI receptionist or a live answering service means a busy period, a staff shortage or an outage doesn't turn into a lost customer.
• Keep inbound numbers independent of any single line. 1300 and 1800 numbers can be re-pointed to a mobile in minutes, which makes them a practical continuity tool as well as a marketing one.
• Review the setup annually. Most businesses outgrow their phone arrangement long before they notice. Our post on the signs your business has outgrown its phone system covers what to look for.

The Bottom Line

The data tells a consistent story. Australian businesses aren't, in the main, unhappy about the technology. They're unhappy about being ignored: tens of thousands of complaints about a provider that didn't act, charges nobody explained, and services that stopped working.

So when you're comparing providers, spend less attention on the headline rate and more on the question that actually predicts your experience: when something goes wrong, does anyone pick up?

Figures in this article are from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman's Annual Report 2024-25.

Looking for a provider that answers? Ozetel is built for Australian businesses that are tired of being a ticket number - local support, no lock-in contracts, and a straight answer when you call. Get in touch and tell us what's not working with your current setup.