TELSTRA says it will work closer with the Maleny Show Society to avoid the debilitating outages that have cost vendors tens of thousands of dollars at recent events including the 100th anniversary of the Show.
Speaking at a combined Maleny and Montville Chamber of Commerce event last week, Telstra representatives apologised for the outages, admitting they had no idea that Maleny was holding its marquee event during upgrades.
Those upgrades, which cut services to customers for around two weeks, were aimed at improving capacity and 5G services.
Despite this, more recent events have still struggled, with vendors at Knitfest and Muscle on the Mountain unable to complete transactions at times with services dropping out.
Division 5 Councillor, Winston Johnston, described the impact on businesses were “seriously” impacted during the outages.
“During the upgrades the outages went on for days. Eftpos machines wouldn’t work, the three ATMs were out, IGA was running out of cash and the banks were running out of cash,” he said.
“When they were doing those upgrades they were impacting on the business community very seriously.”
Regional Manager May Boisen, said: “We are a large corporation, we have local teams on the ground, but we don’t know every single show or event that is happening.”
“We do have an internal team that manages that so you can reach out to us and we can say to you there should be enough capacity or that you will need to have a commercial agreement with us to bring another something else in or another provider.”
Federal Member for Fisher, Andrew Wallace, said he had spoken to Ms Boisen during the show and was confident the situation would not be repeated.
“That was unfortunate and hopefully that won’t happen again,” he said.
Mr Wallace said reception in the hinterland was historically challenging and he hoped that federal regulations could increase coverage, not just capacity.
“We need to put regulations in place around co-investment. At the moment there is no requirement on Telstra to share that infrastructure …. I would like to see an environment if the telcos were required to share their infrastructure on commercial grounds… then they should be able to do that,” he said. He urged businesses struggling with service to contact his office to help fast-track a positive response.
The chamber meeting allowed small operators to speak of their experience with Telstra, with many saying there was a distinct lack of communication.
Maleny Commerce president, Spencer Shaw, said: “We’ve all been steered down this path and we have an expectation that the service will be there for us.”
“There needs to be a discussion about how this does not happen. We went two weeks without service, which came after poor service anyway, to take away two weeks is debilitating.
“It’s as basic as roads and water and something we need our governments to provide these services.”
Montville Chamber president, Shiralee Cooper, said her business and many others continued to suffer despite having line of site to towers.
“My Eftpos drops out every single day. We have line of site but businesses I spoke to couldn’t even make payments. They had to hotspot. It’s been going on for years that we’ve had to struggle with very poor infrastructure.
“My Eftpos is hard-wired and still drops out once or twice a day.
“We’ve been talking about it for 10 years I’ve been president and nothing has improved. In fact I think it’s got worse.”
Ms Boisen said customers should not just rely on the mobile network: “It’s not about not wanting to help you, but the thing is you can’t just rely on the mobile network.”
“We spoke about NBN technology. What is their role to play. Years ago people used to have their home phone, ADSL and the mobile. So they had redundancy in what they needed.”
Telstra said they were now working closely with the Show Society to cater for future events at the showgrounds.
“We are talking with the Show Society about using a wi-fi network that’s dedicated to vendors,” a spokesperson said.
“Those vendors won’t be impacted when the (network goes down) and will still be able to process transactions.”
