May 26, 2015
A telecommunications failure in Maidenwell brought the town to a standstill for almost 10 days.
Local resident Glenda Gillies contacted southburnett.com.au yesterday to say her house hadn’t had a reliable phone service since Saturday, May 16.
She also said many local businesses had been unable to run EFTPOS machines because of the outage.
“We reported the fault to the Telstra Fault number, but people overseas took the calls and they achieved nothing,” Mrs Gillies said.
“They constantly insisted that the problem was fixed, even when it wasn’t.”
Mrs Gillies said many residents did not have a dial tone while the outage was occurring.
Others found that if they made an outgoing call they suffered frequent drop-outs. And if they received an incoming call, they were unable to hear the person at the other end.
“The local Tanduringie State School and the Maidenwell Pub were also greatly affected,” Mrs Gillies said.
“Telstra just assume everyone has access to a mobile phone, but some do not.
“And even if they do, many are in black spots so they can’t use one.
“Smoke signals are about the only way these people can communicate in a situation like this. What would they do in an emergency?”
Mrs Gillies said a Telstra representative had contacted her around 1:25pm yesterday to say the problem had finally been fixed, but she was reserving judgement for the moment.
She is also considering making a complaint to the Telecomunications Ombudsman over the outage.
The Maidenwell Hotel told southburnett.com.au on Tuesday night their EFTPOS services ‘finally’ appeared to have returned to normal over the last 24 hours.
“We had no EFTPOS access since May 14 and we’ve lost thousands because of that,” a staff member said.
“But everything seems to have come back to normal at last.”
A Telstra spokesman confirmed customers in the Maidenwell area had experienced intermittent loss of their landlines and EFTPOS services after multiple equipment failures at a local exchange.
They said technicians attended the site in response to each failure, and had been able to replace faulty hardware items.
Services have been stable since 1:20pm on Monday.
“We apologise to customers for the loss of service and assure them we did everything to restore services as quickly as possible,” the spokesman said.
The spokesman said where Customer Service Guarantee time frames are not met, customers may be eligible for compensation and should phone 132-203.
