No phone and internet at North Haven

Phone and internet services in North Haven were cut on Tuesday affecting almost the whole village, particularly businesses and homes on and around Ocean Drive.

Telstra have reported a “third party” cut communication lines accidentally.

Peter Negus, secretary manager of North Haven Bowling Club, said the lack of communication services was impacting operations at the club.

Peter said internet and mobile phone coverage in North Haven has always been hit-and-miss.

“The National Broadband Network can’t come quickly enough for this area,” he said.

Mobile phone coverage was put to the test when businesses and homes diverted landline calls to mobiles.

“Thankfully we managed to process our wages just before the internet went down,” Peter said.

“We have our IT (information technology) person working to try and get some kind of internet service back. It’s affected our EFTPOS facilies, thankfully our ATM is still operating.

“With a problem of this size, I would hope Telstra is throwing everything they can at fixing the problem quickly.”

Brendon Lynch, owner of Oasis by the River Restaurant, said some customers reported they had been unable to contact the restaurant for two days.

“This is is a key time of year for our business with people organising Christmas parties and making bookings,” Brendon told the Courier on Friday.

“It’s costing me $120 dollars to have my phone diverted to my mobile, then another $120 to have the phone reconnected when the service is back on, plus a technician fee. When I phoned to see what was wrong with the phone at the restaurant the technician said there was no fault with the line so that’s why I would have to pay for the diversion.

“This afternoon at home, I checked my emails to find people had cancelled bookings because we couldn’t answer their phone calls.”

At Ocean Drive Family Practice doctors, nurses and the reception team had contacted each laboratory and collection centre, via mobile phone, to relay the message that client results would have to be sent via courier and any urgent matters would need to be phoned through to the doctors’ mobile phones.

“Our four phone lines have been diverted to one mobile phone and not all calls are getting through, we are returning a lot of messages,” practice manager Christine Kingsbury.

“We can’t bill out at the moment so we aren’t actually generating any income and it’s been that way for a couple of days.”

Peter Negus said while the outage wasn’t the end of the world, it was a costly inconvenience.

“Twenty-five years ago we didn’t use the internet, so something like this wouldn’t be so bad. But we rely on it now, and I wouldn’t like to go back to the days before working online,” he said. 

Telstra area general manager Mike Marom apologised for the outage.

“We apologise for the interruption to some services in the area, which is the result of a third party cable cut,” he said.

“We understand the frustration this can cause and we are working to restore services as quickly as possible.

“Repair crews are hauling in replacement cable and we expect all services to be restored tomorrow (Saturday).”

Some services have already been restored as of Friday afternoon.