A Mt Ousley man has been forced to use the internet on his mobile phone for work and study after a landline outage has cut him off for as long as a week.
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Leigh Robinson said he discovered his phone line – and therefore his internet connection – was dead on Tuesday night.
This was a serious issue for Mr Robinson as he runs a consulting business from home and is also studying – both of which require access to the internet.
“I rang Telstra and they said, ‘oh yeah it’s out. It won’t be back until 7pm on the 29th’,” Mr Robinson said.
“I said ‘that’s not good enough, guys. I’m running a business here and I’m doing a doctorate. I need data’.”
Mr Robinson said Telstra told him to use the hot spot on his mobile phone and he would get a credit for any data used above his plan.
But that seemed to be the best they could offer.
“His supervisor offered to send me a wireless plug-in so I could get the internet,” Mr Robinson said.
“He went to check and found they’d already all been sent out. ‘We don’t have any more’, he said.”
It is understood there have been close to 100 premises in the Mt Ousley area affected by the outage.
A Telstra spokesman said it was due to an issue with a cable but he did not say how it was damaged.
“We apologise to Mr Robinson and any of our customers for the interruption caused by this fault, which is the result of damage to one of our cables,” the spokesman said.
“We are working to restore services as soon as possible but this a complicated repair process, as not only are we replacing cable but we also have to effectively cut out some blockages to accommodate the new cabling.”
The spokesman said the completion date of Wednesday night did not necessarily mean services would not be restored earlier than that.
“While we have set a completion date for next week, services will start being progressively restored over the coming days,” he said.