Torquay mobile outage impacting small business

A delay in scheduled mobile tower maintenance has plunged Torquay businesses into the dark this week.

Tower upgrade works were due to finish in the area by 16 March but will now run until 27 March.

Ben Hucker, who owns Stonker Boards in Torquay, was left without phone or internet access, which he said had a significant impact on his business.

“It’s been playing up all week,” Hucker said. “Wednesday was the worst with a total blackout.”

“It just makes it really hard to run a business – no social media, no emails, no phone calls.”

With both business admin and customer payments affect, Hucker said he would not have opened the store had he known the extent of the disruptions.

“We’ve had to turn people away with invoices and we’re just relying on them to pay up,” Hucker said.

“I had to chase up one guy this morning to pay an invoice and had to drive into town in Torquay to call him.

“It’s pretty disruptive.”

He said the outages had already affected the business’s finances for the month and that better notice would have allowed him to prepare for limited payment options.

By Thursday, he had noticed some improvement and was hopeful it would continue.

“It makes me very nervous,” he said. “Saturday is our busiest day and the outages mean we cant take payments. It’s going to have a big impact on sales for the month for sure.”

While the works have been impacting Telstra customers, a spokesperson reiterated it was another provider working on the impacted tower.

“The works were initially planned for late February, however the other provider rescheduled their program, which is why some earlier dates may still be circulating. The works are now underway, having started on 11 March and running through to 27 March,” the spokesperson said.

“There was a full site outage between 11 and 13 March, and from 16 to 27 March the work is being completed sector by sector, meaning only one part of the site is taken offline at a time to reduce disruption.

“Mobile services are fully restored each night, and there is no impact to fixed services.”

The Optus outage map shows disruptions until 25 March in Torquay due to “planned work on a mobile tower”.

The telecommunications provider had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.