Days-long outages lasted for two weeks
By Kirra Livingstone
RESIDENTS in Peachester have been forced to suffer through weeks of landline and internet outages thanks to ongoing NBN outages.
The telco was undertaking upgrades, but despite informing residents there would be minimal delays, those outages extended for 14 days.
Peachester local Neville Casey said his phone and internet weren’t working and he had no back-up communications.
“The internet and my phone system which goes through the NBN was out for the last two weeks,” he said.
“I don’t know what the situation was, some people have a mobile phone backup which means if the NBN goes down, they’ll go onto a system, well my system has no back up, if it goes down, it goes down.”
He said he knew of others across Peachester who had the same experience.
“It’s not just me, there’s other people who I know who were having problems too, my NBN tower is just up the road in Peachester,” he said.
“My other friend who gets his NBN from the Bald Knob tower, experienced the same outages through his network,” said Neville.
Although residents were receiving text message alerts from NBN notifying them of how long outages will last, many went over the predicted outage time.
“NBN were sending us SMS messages to let us know about the outages, the only trouble is you would only think that it would be out for an hour, you wouldn’t think it would be out days on end,” Neville said.
“On March 1 I was told my NBN would be back on at 7pm, and the next message on March 2 said it wouldn’t be back until March 8. That doesn’t mean that it was going to be back online.”
Ironically, the text message include a link for residents to go to if they are experiencing major delays, which of course won’t work for them at home as they don’t have internet.
Neville said a lot of elderly people live in Peachester, who don’t have access to a mobile phone, leaving them completely isolated, particularly if they need to call emergency services.
GC&M News reached out to NBN for comment, and a spokesperson said that upgrades were now complete, and apologised for any inconvenience.
“We take all reasonable efforts to minimise service interruptions; however, planned outages may impact homes and businesses and their ability to access their NBN connection while work takes place,” the NBN spokesperson said.
“We are sorry for interruptions to services, but hope customers will notice an improvement to their internet connections following these works.”
kirra@gcnews.com.au