Cut out with no services on offer

http://www.bordermail.com.au/story/4042127/cut-out-with-no-services-on-offer/


Connectivity issues continue to plague the North East, as Walwa Post Office was left without any communications services for two weeks, causing havoc for customers.

Manager Belinda Mann said the outage, which occurred between June 29 and July 13, severely affected the elderly who needed to pay bills on time.

“I couldn’t do any banking, couldn’t sell a phone recharge, and I couldn’t even sell a pensioner’s stamp,” she said.

The post office’s system links services from IBM, Telstra and Australia Post.

“If they don’t have all the same codes and marry up, everything stops,” Ms Mann said.

“It took them 15 days to work it all out - and 15 days of no trading.”

An Australia Post spokesman called it “an unfortunate system outage” but did not offer an explanation for its cause.

“Australia Post would like to sincerely apologise to the Walwa community and the operator of the post office for any inconvenience this outage caused,” he said.

Ms Mann thanked Australia Post for its response but was at a loss to explain the reason the problem occurred.

A Telstra technician from Albury took two days to get the connections working.

Ms Mann said she hadn’t estimated how much money in total she would have lost but was preparing a compensation claim.

Jingellic Post Office manager Debbie Bowman told The Border Mail her services also suffered in the same period.

“Telstra is blamed for one thing, Australia Post for another – there’s nothing you can do,” she said.

“You lose money. You can’t do any banking or pay any bills.

“Farmers have to come from a distance to pay their bills and, if they can’t pay it they’ve got to go back, it’s a waste of petrol and time.”

Both Ms Mann and Ms Bowman also reported regular power outages.
“It’s the community who suffer,” Ms Mann said.

Walwa Vet Practice office manager Suzie Vinge said slow internet speeds and regular electricity black outs made the operating the business tricky.

A specially-built truck from the National Broadband Network toured Walwa on Wednesday to demonstrate speeds of its new satellite service.

“Why would we get a satellite dish on our roof? We should be entitled to the NBN rollout,” Ms Vinge said.