Another week, another outage

$WHERE\\'S THE COVERAGE?: Strathbogie resident John O\\'Brien has been frustrated over a week-long outage in the Strathbogie Tablelands that has impacted his website design work which he conducts from home. He is one of many who says urgent action is needed for Strathbogie residents who rely on connectivity for their livelihoods.$

WHERE'S THE COVERAGE?: Strathbogie resident John O'Brien has been frustrated over a week-long outage in the Strathbogie Tablelands that has impacted his website design work which he conducts from home. He is one of many who says urgent action is needed for Strathbogie residents who rely on connectivity for their livelihoods.

JOHN O’Brien has had enough, and he’s not alone. Along with hundreds of residents throughout the Strathbogie township, Ruffy and other regions throughout the Tablelands have endured an extensive mobile phone outage this past week. Mr O’Brien...

Philippe Perez

February 16, 2021 • 01:00

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JOHN O’Brien has had enough, and he’s not alone.

Along with hundreds of residents throughout the Strathbogie township, Ruffy and other regions throughout the Tablelands have endured an extensive mobile phone outage this past week.

Mr O’Brien, who works as a website designer and writer from his home in Strathbogie, has not only seen significant disruptions to his work but has flagged concerns over a regular occurrence of connectivity issues in the regions.

He said this latest outage throughout is not good enough, particularly for those who choose to work from home in the region.

“It means no telephony, no internet, for pretty much most of the day for the week,” Mr O’Brien said.

“Professionally, I work online and rely on having a connection which shouldn’t be haphazard, because I need to be available to work during actual business hours.”

Mr O’Brien also said community facilities like the 24-hour diesel tank at the Strathbogie Recreation Ground, which has been inoperable due to the outage, needed good connectivity to benefit the community as a whole.

“Some of my community-focused work has been impacted and phone calls that I need to make in regards to that are totally reliant on that,” Mr O’Brien said.

“I’ve had to take a slightly extreme step of having to defer mostly everything for a week and banked up phone calls for when I go to Euroa, but it causes issues if I leave a message for someone and they can’t call me back when I am here in Strathbogie.”

Boho South resident Stuart Bridgman has also had enough and said consistent dropouts were still prevalent despite having a booster antenna installed ion his property.

“We moved here three years ago and our reception was nearly non-existent and we the installation here which cost nearly $1000,” Mr Bridgeman said.

“We were told that we needed to point our antenna to a tower in Glenrowan as that provided the best line of sight for us to get best coverage rather than Mt Wombat, but with even this antenna, it still regularly drops out.”

Mr Bridgeman said he was particularly concerned about what may happen when there is an emergency in the Tablelands.

“Not too far away from us at the Kallara Conference Centre, there could be up to around 150 people visiting with kids, and I do worry about what the impact on them may be if there is an event there,” he said.

“So many other people are just shocked when I say we have fair connectivity which is concerning when we aren’t even noted down as a mobile blackspot.

Steve Tinker, Regional General Manager, Telstra told the Gazette that the impact to 3G and 4G services was caused by a suspected fault in hardware transmission and not related to the Mt Wombat tower's upgrade from 3G to 4G which took place more than two years ago.

“We’re pleased to say we’ve restored services at Mt Wombat and we’re now seeing 3G and 4G traffic back at normal levels in Strathbogie and surrounding areas,” Mr Tinkler said.

“Our techs were on site all day Friday replacing a faulty piece of transmission hardware and then re-optimised network services.”

“We know how frustrating it’s been while services were disrupted and we’re sorry it’s taken us some time to work through this complex issue.”

Telstra has previously stated that the Mt Wombat tower can have challenges providing coverage to locations in the Tablelands because of terrain and topography.