The maximum fine for breaching industry codes is now more than $10 million, up from $250,000, after changes to the Telecommunications Act passed federal parliament.
"This law puts in place clear rules setting out how telcos must support their customers," Communications Minister Anika Wells said on Friday.
"Particularly those experiencing financial hardship or domestic, family and sexual violence."
The amendments also enable the Australian Communications and Media Authority to take "swift and strong action against any telco found to have done the wrong thing".
Under the new regime, fines will be based on the value of the benefit obtained from the breach, or the turnover of the offending telco.
The bolstered penalties are aimed at telcos that have previously put profits before people and treated penalties as the cost of doing business.
It also improves industry transparency by establishing a carriage service provider registration scheme to increase telco accountability and enable the authority to stop dodgy providers from operating.
"Strengthening consumer protections means a fairer and better system for everyone," Minister Wells said.
The new laws followed a series of breaches by the nation's two largest telecommunication companies, Telstra and Optus.
These include the Federal Court ruling that Telstra made false or misleading claims about its upload speeds in 2025.
Optus Mobile admitted it engaged in unconscionable conduct when selling telecommunications services to hundreds of consumers following court action led by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
Pressure on the telcos increased in 2026, with fresh scandals.
Telstra's nationwide mobile outage in July left users unable to make calls or access data on their mobile phones, while some EFTPOS transactions were also impacted.
Legal action was also launched against Optus in late July after an outage in September 2025 left its customers unable to dial triple zero for 14 hours.
This network failure has been linked to two deaths.
17°C