Patrick Goldsmith, Yorke Peninsula Country Times

Southern Yorke Peninsula residents are concerned about their phone coverage after being hit with a 12-day outage.

Angela Schmidt, who operates Charles Street Hair and Beauty, Yorketown, was without phone reception from Saturday, June 10 until Wednesday, June 21.

The unplanned outage, which lasted the first six days, preceded a planned outage to upgrade the local 4G system for the next five days, as Telstra looks to phase out the 3G system.

“All the businesses around here were affected and contacted Telstra but would just be given the run around,” she said.

“They couldn’t tell us when our services would be re-established; they were just hard to deal with.”

As a result, Ms Schmidt was unable to contact clients to remind them of their appointments or accept payments via EFTPOS.

Ms Schmidt said the problem caused great confusion and frustration.

“My booking system is through an app on my iPad but I couldn’t get into that, so I had no idea who was coming and going, hoping my clients would turn up,” she said.

“They couldn’t ring us because they had no phone signal to say they were cancelling so last week was just a nightmare.”

She said she had made three attempts to gain further information from Telstra, as well as from federal Member for Grey Rowan Ramsey’s office.

“I’d just get the run around from Telstra each time; ‘we’re sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, we understand’,” she said.

“The ordeal meant I lost revenue and, while I was told I would be compensated for the days it occurred, that’s not really enough because it has more of a lasting effect than that.”

Telstra regional general manager for South Australia Michael Patterson acknowledged the issue and said fixed line services, NBN internet connectivity and calls to 000 weren’t impacted by the outage.

Locals lament lost connection

Telstra had scheduled a 4G upgrade to its Yorketown base station in the second half of June.

“We had planned to send out a text message notification to residents of this work on June 11,” regional general manager for South Australia Michael Patterson said.

“Unfortunately, the day before we suffered an unrelated transmission issue, meaning the site couldn’t connect to the broader Telstra network and went off air, meaning calls could not connect and messages could not be sent.

“Our techs combined the repair to the transmission issue and the upgrade into one activity and full services were restored on Wednesday, June 21.

“While Telstra worked to get the work done as quickly as we could, we know this extended outage had an impact on the community and for that we are sorry.”

Member for Grey Rowan Ramsey said the outage was a complicated problem.

“Modern technology is a complicated thing, and everything breaks down at some point… these things do happen,” he said.

“Most businesses should have alternative communication lines and the mobile phone being out doesn’t take the landline or internet service out usually.

“We (electorate of Grey) got two towers from the last round of the Mobile Black Spot Program, which went almost exclusively to Labor electorates around Australia.

“There’s another round open at the moment, round seven, and there’s the Regional Connectivity Program as well which keeps allowing people to follow up and put better technology in place.”

Telstra has also announced it has completed a community consultation process for an upgrade to its tower at Point Turton.

Telstra regional general manager for South Australia Michael Patterson said if any works go ahead, they would occur within the next year.

“Demand on our mobile network is continually rising and nationally each day we have about 60 million calls and 40 million SMS (messages) travelling across our network,” he said.

“As a result, we need to upgrade our mobile base stations on a regular basis, including this one at Point Turton.

“We are proposing to reconfigure the existing antennas and also add some new technology into our equipment hut, including the ability to deliver 5G services to the local area in the future.”

This article appeared in the Yorke Peninsula Country Times, 27 June 2023.