Frustration over outage delay

By Lachlan Ellis

An internet disruption lasting a week longer than planned has left Balliang East residents frustrated, while the provider has apologised for the delay which was “unrelated to works”.

Telstra began upgrades on the Balliang East mobile base station last month, and said that mobile coverage would be down from Monday 4 December to Friday 8 December as a result, with temporary disruptions during daylight hours.

But as late as Sunday 17 December, locals contacted the Moorabool News stating they still had no coverage.

One resident, Roger Smith, said the delay to coverage returning had hurt his business.

“We were warned about the outage by SMS and had resigned ourselves to having an intermittent connection as stated by Telstra. The reality was that the service failed immediately on the 4th, and with some minor exceptions, pretty much got worse and worse until it eventually died altogether on 12 December – a day after it was meant to be working again. During that time the connection often dropped out for hours at a time,” Mr Smith said on 17 December.

“When asked for an expected fix date I was told that no definite time could be provided but that it “might take 7 days, not including weekends”.”

Telstra’s Regional General Manager, Steve Tinker, apologised for the delay to service returning, and said a cut cable was responsible for service taking longer than planned to return.

He added that services were operational again on Monday 18 December, a day after Mr Smith got in touch with the Moorabool News.

“Unfortunately, unrelated to the upgrade works, an optic fibre cable was cut impacting mobile services until our technicians were able to repair the damage. All mobile services were back online on Monday 18 December,” Mr Tinker told the Moorabool News.

“While we worked to get everything back online as soon as we could, we apologise that services were impacted longer than we had planned and thank everyone for their patience.”

The next week after services returned, Mr Smith acknowledged that his service had returned on Tuesday 19 December, but said he was frustrated about the lack of communication.

“We were not made aware of the extended disruption other than through Telstra’s “outages” site, and even that was incorrect as to both our locality and to the locality of the disruption, leading to considerable confusion with Telstra staff we asked to help us. We were told at some stage through the process that a new part had to be ordered but were not given any timeframe on when it would arrive or what the problem was,” he said.

“We’re happy to have our service back, but I will be asking Telstra to reimburse us for the week from 12 December to 19 December. The time I spent on the phone, on Telstra’s app, and on our roof moving antennas around to try and get any signal, was in the order of 10 hours or more. It’s impossible to know how much business we lost.”

The mobile base station upgrades are set to provide better 4G and 5G capacity and connectivity to the community.