The federal government will grill the bosses of Australia’s biggest telecommunications companies over the reliability of triple-zero services in the looming summer bushfire season, as Labor fast-tracks laws to protect the emergency call system.

On the back foot over Labor’s response to recent Optus triple-zero outages which have been linked to three deaths, the communications minister, Anika Wells, has ordered the chief executive of the company, as well as the chief executives of Telstra and TPG, the owner of Vodafone, to travel to Canberra on Tuesday to discuss safeguards for the system.

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Wells plans to press the companies on their legal obligations to protect community safety and procedures to avoid outages.

The government will introduce new legislation this week to establish an independent guardian for the triple-zero network, and require companies to provide real-time updates of outages on their networks.

“People must have trust in the reliability of our triple-zero service when they need it most,” Wells told Optus boss Stephen Rue in a letter released on Sunday.

“Despite this, outages have occurred and more needs to be done by telecommunications companies.”

Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady and TPG’s Iñaki Berroeta received the same request for urgent meetings.

On 18 September, a network firewall upgrade blocked emergency calls for Optus customers in South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of New South Wales.

The deaths of two people in SA and one in WA have been linked to the outages. A fourth death – an infant in SA – was found likely to have been unrelated.

A separate outage on 28 September affected nine calls to the triple-zero network on one tower in the Illawarra region of NSW but Optus has confirmed the welfare of all who tried to call.

Tougher laws were first flagged last year, in response to an earlier Optus outage in November 2023. The Albanese government then asked the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for advice on amending emergency call service legislation.

Optus named former NBN co-director and Deutsche Bank boss Kerry Schott to lead an independent review into the technical failures behind the outages. The ACMA has begun its own investigation into Optus’ compliance, with emergency call service regulations and other related rules.

Wells has already met the chief executive of Optus’s parent company Singtel, Yuen Kuan Moon, as well as the Optus chair, John Arthur, and Rue, over the outages.

The opposition plans to target the government and Wells’ response to the outages in Senate estimates hearings this week.

The shadow communications minister, Melissa McIntosh, said Labor should have acted more quickly to implement recommendations from a review of the 2023 outages.

“I think Australians are starting to lack confidence in the triple-zero network firstly, which is disastrous,” she told Sky on Sunday.

“They’re certainly lacking confidence in Optus because of this. This isn’t their first time and it’s resulted in deaths. Of course they’d be lacking confidence.”

The industry minister, Tim Ayres, said Optus should have ensured triple-zero services were protected, defending the slow roll out of the new network guardian’s powers.

“That is all of the architecture that the government has committed to delivering,” he said. “But in the end, this is Optus’ failure, and it’s a pretty devastating failure.”