Businesswoman Tara Toomey first noticed a telecommunications issue when one of her staff tried to process the first sale of the day at her shop in the New South Wales town of Uralla on Thursday 17 March.
“The system said ‘SOS only’ and that’s when we knew we had a problem,” she says.
“We started trying to send customers to an ATM. These were all travellers, which is how we realised our ATMs were also out.”
Toomey says her neighbour on the main street uses the national broadband network and also reported a lack of service.
Telstra had sent texts to mobile customers in Uralla the week prior, warning of possible service interruptions during upgrades.
“We get those all the time, but it’s never before meant ‘SOS only’,” Toomey says. “We kept thinking it would just be one day, but by Friday afternoon we were kind of terrified.”
After hearing that Telstra service was available outside Uralla, Toomey drove to the outskirts and called the telco, but “just kept going in circles”. She then tried the office of Barnaby Joyce, the federal member for New England.
“The response was, ‘We’ll make some calls’, and I appreciated they did that, but they called me back shortly before 5pm and said: ‘Look, we’ve tried, we can’t get anyone at Telstra, just give it a few more days.’
“I tried not to cry down the phone, but at the same time I thought, I can’t comprehend this, our deputy prime minister can’t contact anyone at a part government-owned critical piece of infrastructure like our telecommunications.
“It made me really quite frustrated on behalf of the government, if that’s how Telstra’s treating them, but also on behalf of us as people who part-own that entity, and our own representative couldn’t get answers or any action.”
‘It was pure luck’
Late in the afternoon of Wednesday 16 March, Tina Ryan needed to call triple zero to get her terminally ill husband Owen to hospital for pain relief.
“He had really chronic pain. There was no way I could get him to the car, so that’s when I tried to call triple zero,” she says.
Ryan attempted to call the emergency service from two Telstra phones, one an NBN landline and the other a mobile.
“It just didn’t connect to anywhere,” she says. “Then I tried a non-Telstra mobile which thankfully connected.”
Ryan had changed providers on one of the household’s mobile phones, seeking value for money. “It was pure luck that we had it here in the house,” she says.
Two days into the outage, the deputy mayor Bob Crouch, who lives 2km out of Uralla, found he couldn’t make a call from his Telstra mobile while in town.
Crouch is president of the Diggings Rural Fire Brigade in the Uralla district and there was a callout for a fire.
“We have pagers, but a lot of us don’t carry the pagers any more,” he says. “Now we have a phone app that notifies us when there’s a callout, and there was a callout when me and our senior deputy captain just happened to be in town.”
But neither received the app alert until they returned to their homes a couple of hours later, when their phones indicated a grassfire outside Uralla.
Owen Ryan was taken by ambulance to Armidale hospital to access the pain relief he needed on 16 March. He died on 14 May.
The grassfire on the edge of Uralla on 18 March was put out by other Rural Fire Service volunteers.
But as the Telstra outage continued through the weekend of 19-20 March, Toomey grew concerned it would disrupt one of Uralla’s biggest annual events on 26 March.
Seasons of New England, which Toomey organises, gathers more than 100 artisans from across the region, most of whom rely on Telstra mobile services for sales.
“On Monday, the Telstra website was saying service would be out until 28 March,” Toomey says. “I didn’t feel confident at all that it was going to be resolved.”
Toomey contacted ABC Radio and spoke about the outage on air, after the broadcaster also aired an interview with Michael Marom, the northern NSW regional general manager for Telstra.
Telstra mobile services were restored to Uralla on Wednesday 23 March, around the same time Toomey’s high street neighbour reported a return of their NBN service.
Marom told Guardian Australia the existing Uralla region tower was upgraded in March to increase 4G coverage and bandwidth.
“We minimise outages and impact where we can but sometimes we can’t avoid it,” he says. “Sometimes there are operational issues, damage to our network and sometimes, as in the case of Uralla, we need to take the towers offline to upgrade them with new capacity or add 5G.”
Toomey and Crouch agree the lack of notice from Telstra gave insufficient warning to make alternative arrangements.
“We all accept there is need for maintenance work and upgrades,” Toomey says. “But we need to know if it’s going to result in a complete outage while that work is undertaken. In the end we were out for eight days.”
Toomey says she wrote to Joyce as her federal representative.
“If the framework that the federal government puts in place does not deliver that basic level of service, then they’ve got it wrong and they’ve got to fix it,” she says.
Joyce then wrote to regional communications minister Bridget McKenzie raising the issue, and was advised that the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications would engage with Telstra to determine how similar processes could be managed in the future and how disruption could be minimised.
‘Rebuild that trust’
Toomey says Telstra has reached out since the outage.
“They’ve acknowledged the mistake, but you have to do the work to rebuild that trust with the communities that have been so badly affected,” she says.
“The statement was made to me repeatedly and very clearly that it was my choice to simply rely on a mobile service. I should have the NBN on as well as mobile phone in my shop and in my home. I don’t think that’s reasonable. That’s a double service payment.”
Crouch believes there is no reason why a complete outage couldn’t happen anywhere else.
“I believe the Telecommunication Act needs to be amended. There is a guarantee of service for the landline, but there doesn’t appear to be any guarantee of service for the mobile services,” he says.
“For central business districts of towns, surely people need to be able to rely on the carrier they’ve got.”
Ryan says it’s a “scary thought” that an outage could happen again.
“I think we take our telecommunications systems for granted, that they’ll just work when we need them,” she says. “Sometimes they just don’t. I think people need to be aware that it could happen.”
Marom says the triple zero case is being looked into, and compensation for Uralla Telstra customers would be treated on a case-by-case basis. They should contact the telco and request a compensation pack.
According to Chris Marks, Telstra’s national public affairs manager, the outage was only for Telstra mobile services and landlines were not impacted, nor were NBN services or mobile coverage from other carriers with sites in the area.
