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The area you are phoning has been disconnected – for most of a week.
You wouldn’t hear that in Sydney.
But the 100 residents of Tooraweenah, near Gilgandra, have been frustrated by repeated phone failures last week. They say their landline phones were cut off during daylight hours. Businesses could not use EFTPOS and people were running out of cash.
And, like vast chunks of the 250,000 square kilometres around it, Tooraweenah has poor, if any, mobile reception.
So, how do you phone Telstra to complain? You can’t. You also can’t eat if you can’t get cash to buy food or even buy petrol to drive to “civilisation” in a nearby town.
Telstra says there was one outage for 30 hours from Friday at 2.30pm because of a hardware fault, which has since been fixed.
It did not comment on claimed problems earlier in the week.
Residents say phones were failing intermittently for a week.
Lines dropped out as the days heated up and came back in cooler night air. Some claim they reported problems but saw no technicians or vans racing to help.
Whatever the cause, a situation like this would never be tolerated in the big city.
What if someone had a medical crisis or needed an ambulance, fire services, police?
The country shouldn’t have to tolerate it, either.
The government and all phone suppliers must ensure this never happens anywhere again.