Stevenson’s Hydraulics lost their communication lines on August 30, and apart from a brief return for five days early in the month, they had to do without it until phones were restored on Wednesday. The internet still wasn’t working properly.

Stevenson’s Hydraulics general manager Matthew Wray said the outage had cost them a “substantial” amount of money.

Instead of six phone lines and internet services, the business was reduced to operating on three mobile phones. Their mobile technicians were also unable to log in to the system out in the field.

“We service the whole central west and you will get someone ring up and ask for a price on an item. If they can’t get us, they just ring a different business. They will grab the yellow pages and move on to the next listing,” he said.

“You can see from our day to day figures that we aren’t getting that transaction. Our invoice numbers are down, our totals are down and our enquiries are down.”

On Monday, the office of Parkes MP Mark Coulton intervened to lend assistance, while on Tuesday the Daily Liberal made enquiries to both Telstra and the nbn.

By Wednesday morning, both organisations had made contact with Mr Wray and his phone service had been restored.

“This is not the experience we want for our customers and we have personally apologised to Mr Wray for the inconvenience,” a Telstra spokesperson said.

“The service has been restored and we will continue to work directly with the customer to ensure he is happy with his internet service.”

Mr Wray said he was still waiting to hear about the internet, and said he was wary because the problem had come back before. He said the most frustrating aspect of the outage had been his battle to get information from anyone.

“We had one nbn technician and three Telstra technicians come and look and I spent hours at a time on the phone trying to get it fixed but noone could tell me when it would be fixed,” he said.

“I still don’t know what the problem was and whether or not it could happen again.”

An nbn spokesperson said an investigation on September 1 found there was no problem with the NBN network.

They said internet problems should be reported to a service provider.

“This is important because there can often be issues affecting a service that is outside of the nbn network. If they cannot identify an issue, they will escalate to nbn on their customer’s behalf,” they said.