Is Your Service Essential ?

With about 20 years in the Telecommunication industry and across more outages than worth mentioning I am more than perplexed with the handling of the outage Thagoona and surrounding areas have just experienced.

Available sites extracted from an information trail well shielded by corporate jargon and AI bots the fault come in at 0300hrs on the 13th August and working on it.

By the 14th some restoration occurred and service restored then at about 1500 hrs service withdrawn and total darkness.

My frustration mounted and complaints and launched to NBN and my supplier Telstra with a standard corporate spiel delivered ever changing restoration times that every supplier across the retail suppliers spun to their customers .

My blood pressure needed lowering so I took a drive as you do if your a old lineman and follow the cable route I actually had part of constructing in the area and found absolutely nothing but a few guards along the roadside indicating a problem but unmanned.

This to me the contractor closed up went home and I can only assume lack of cable or equipment to repair, and customer priority not an issue, costs involving activating other suppliers took the profits margins too low.

So all the ducks lines up and around 2000hrs on the 15th the lights come back on and we are supposed to be grateful everything is Tipperary Boo.

I say NO and there are questions and actions that need to be clarified as Thagoona and surrounding areas will have outages caused by physical damage and upgrades as part of the influx of population into our piece of heaven.

To me it’s pretty obvious there is no equipment or plant devoted to a major incident and the subcontractors network is the fallback and who coordinates that on the ground from discovery of the fault?

Well that went well didn’t it?

Rodders, condute repair, haulers then jointers and techs need to be activated instantly as well as lighting and traffic control, but most of all customer information streams need to be created in the area of impact, AND the decision to do a temporary repair and come back later and interrupt again for permanent OR a permanent repair first up depends on each and every fault.

Maybe I’m living in the past but I believe our communications have never been more important today compared from the past, so our risk management in the telecommunication industry has to be top priority but they get a absolute FAIL at Thagoona., and its not the fault of the boys on the ground doing the work, its a industry standard that has been neglected for the bottom line of some company and not the customer.

Please consider if a fault not in the Ipswich area, away from the convenient distance and how would they go especially if the fault involved not only home but phone down what would the fallback position be then ??

I suggest a piecemeal approach again but a much longer down time and that then becomes a danger to public safety, that why Telecommunications must be reinstated as an Essential Service.

We are a aging population, we have the tyranny of distance, and we all have been encourage to embrace or enforced in some cases to rely on all forms of data transfer and I believe cannot rely on someones profit margin over public safety.

I put this on the agenda to all our political representatives and I do not accepts its too hard to do as we still have some very skilled people still alive who know exactly how to get it done..

Why them, THEY BUIL:T IT and your still enjoying their legacy to get you service today.

The Girral GRUMP