Just this weekend a discussion about the speed of technology advances tossed up a few curiosities.
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Well may we say the kids of today wouldn’t understand the concept of an operator having to connect your calls, or even having a telephone in the home connected to the wall.
Then again, our younger generations are unlikely to grasp the concept of having to type out texts by lengthy combinations of number key presses to get to the corresponding letters. And this is in the space of just 20 years of SMS, not the 120 of landlines.
With landline technology having an important place in Australian society since before Federation, why are we still seeing such basic services failing some of our most vulnerable?
How is it in this day and age a community can be left without phone service for almost a week? (And the best the country’s telco giant can do is ship out a mobile phone...which doesn’t get reception anyway.)
Understandably there are locations where our country’s mobile phone service does not reach (remoteness, terrain, etc) – perhaps that’s even preferable for some?
But it seems ludicrous that more than 60 residences at Tanja were without any form of communication service for six days with each being told it’s their own problem rather than a service-wide fault.
Is this solely a “First World problem”? Are we so reliant on our mobile phones and internet that we can’t cope when they drop out for any length of time? Perhaps.
Then again, it’s because we (that’s we the society, not we the individuals) are so reliant on internet and mobile technology these days for even the most simple of tasks that to lose it creates significant inconvenience.
There would be various reasons for a complete failure of the system in a locality such as Tanja – ageing infrastructure or damage from storms or construction works just two possibilities. And to be fair, more attention is paid to the failures in the system to the countless days and locations where it works without a hitch.
But more telling is the response, or lack thereof, to the issue.
A similar discussion is happening across the nation in regards to the NBN network, with multiple reports of technician no-shows and poor service nowhere near resembling that promised.
Then again, don’t get us started on NBN or we could be here a lot longer (particularly given it hasn’t even reached town yet...)