By Dominique Tassell
A long list of Stanthorpe businesses have been affected by their landlines not working after the copper line in the area was switched over to NBN.
Leanne at Masquerade Hair Studio was without incoming calls for over a month in total.
She said Telstra don’t show up when they say they will.
“It took a while to sort out getting incoming calls.”
“It does affect your business,” Leanne says.
She says she was going to just buy a mobile phone and be done with it but that doesn’t set the town up for down the road.
After she “made enough of a noise”, she says that the problem was fixed by the end of July.
Jan, the owner of Stanthorpe Medical Centre, says they’ve had a lot of trouble with NBN.
It was on and off, he says, and it started in June.
He says the problem started when they switched over from old copper lines to NBN.
Luckily, the medical centre has a mobile phone for work use and they’ve been able to circulate that number to patients.
Jan says he’s had a lot of communication with NBN.
He’s ordered better fibre and says “I’ve done everything I could to improve the connection and improve my service and now I’m paying the price for doing the right thing”.
Jan says Telstra starting disconnecting lines in June.
He’s been with Westnet for 12 years, which has been purchased by iiNet, so he’s been transferred over to them.
He says he’s been told he has put a new phone, “everything”, on the premises.
Jan says the providers can’t do much when Telstra disconnects lines because Telstra owns the infrastructure.
He’s been bombarding iiNet to do something about it, but they refer him to Telstra.
They reactivated line when they heard it was a medical centre, and it was “not so bad until last week”.
Now, patients call the centre and hear it’s been disconnected.
Jan says iiNet and Westnet aren’t performing well, but Telstra isn’t cooperating.
He says they won’t talk to him because he’s not a customer of Telstra, but iiNet are “backed into a corner and overwhelmed by the situation”.
He says Telstra holds the number and won’t cooperate
“Since early June when our problem started we heard from other people in town that work was being done.”
Jan is worried he won’t be able to get his number back if left “disconnected” for too long, and he will lose the phone number the centre has had for decades.
He says internet has “virtually disappeared” since Tuesday 27 July.
Jan is trying to create a new system from home to take to the centre so they can get internet.
“Instead of helping us they just disconnected the line, end of story,” he says.
At Em’s Café, the landline isn’t working and hasn’t worked for about three months.
Which is about as long as the café has been open.
They’ve been told the problem won’t be fixed until the end of September, and are using their personal phone number for the time being.
The owner says “I put off putting my mobile number for a while, it was a last resort”.
She says she thought about it for a long time, thinking “do I get just a little phone for the meantime?”
“But I don’t want to pay for that”.
At Hair of Distinction, they had trouble applying for NBN in the first place.
They say they applied three times, and were told each time they hadn’t applied in the necessary timeframe though they insist they had.
They had to go the ombudsman to get them to disconnect the phone after it became too much of a hassle.
Since then, they’ve been hit with a phone bill of over $1000, and the owner says “the sooner I get rid of the landline the better”.
While the phone was officially disconnected on 5 July, it actually disconnected last Wednesday on 21 July.
At the Apple and Grape Festival office, they didn’t realise their number wasn’t working until someone asked them why their number was disconnected.
They say they’ve had to get a wireless router, and are still paying their phone bill…for a phone that doesn’t work.
They almost lost their phone number but have thankfully sorted it out.
They say they have to pay $89 a month plus diversion fees.
The NBN and providers are essentially point the finger at one another, and maintain that they’ve only documented small outages in the area.
Telstra say “a small number of residents in Stanthorpe may have experienced short term outages with their fixed line and internet services earlier this week”.
“The cause was an issue with the NBN network in the area but was resolved by NBN on 28 July.”
NBN effectively said the same thing, that there was nothing on their side that could have caused the outages.
Nonetheless, the phones still aren’t ringing.
