Residents, schools and even businesses in Cambridge Park have not had their normal Telstra phone and Internet services for almost five weeks.
Lee Gray from Deborah Crescent said her Telstra phone and Internet has been completely out of action since severe storms lashed the area on April 24.
“I’ve got to go to the bank and pay my bills – I feel like we are all back in the dark ages,” she said.
“My sons have homework so we have to go to the library and pay for Internet.”
Ms Gray was told by Telstra the problems would be fixed by May 25 and is frustrated that her neighbours, with other providers, still had their services during this time.
Telstra has paid one of Ms Gray’s phone bills and offered her a satellite phone to compensate, but she did not believe it was suited to her needs.
“I asked for a USB stick because I’m studying online and have to go to the library, but I’m preserving the data on it because it’s so minimal for my email messages,” she said.
Deborah Crescent is not alone, with Cambridge Park Public School on an adjacent street also struggling without their normal phone connection.
The school’s relieving principal, Janice Clark said after the first storm, administration couldn’t makes calls for over a week, but it didn’t end there.
“There was the second outage from May 6 to 15, and the third outage from May 18 until now,” she said.
Telstra have now restored one phone line into the school and reconnected them with the pre-school at the back of the school.
“Incoming calls are diverted to the school mobile and we have one line that Telstra have given us to use but it’s not our number so no-one is calling it,” she said.
“It’s been difficult because parents are trying to ring in and it’s the one line.”
Telstra’s Area General Manager, Andrew Bogg said Telstra has been doing everything they can to restore services quickly, but the storms did significant damage.
“It has been a complicated repair process given water damage to the cable and the fact it has caused multiple faults on a number of different parts of the cable,” he said.
“A number of services have already been restored and we expect all services to be restored before the end of this week.”
– Dale Drinkwater
