Flood Update No 11 from Telstra
Filed under: Brisbane, cyclone yasi, floods, natural disaster, networks, Queensland, restoration, update
The Telstra network has returned to normal operating levels and there are currently no ongoing significant impacts to landline, broadband or mobile service in Brisbane and surrounding suburbs.
Individual service faults – volumes, priority areas and average repair times
However, there are still a significant number of customers with individual service faults at their premises – mainly as a result of water damage. These individual faults may be due to premises being uninhabitable or not yet declared safe.
To have individual services restored, customers are reminded they should report all faults to Telstra once their home or business has been declared safe.
Our technicians are working hard to restore these individual faults as quickly as possible, but current average repair times vary from 3 to 7 days in most areas. Delays may be lengthier in some of the worst hit areas where telecommunications infrastructure was completely destroyed.
The priority for our technicians is maximising fault reduction and continuing to repair major components of the network in the worst affected areas. Key areas of concentration are Brisbane, Ipswich, Lockyer Valley and affected regions of North Queensland.
Inaccessible red zones
While we have seen a dramatic reduction in the number inaccessible ‘red zones’, there are still a small number of areas which we still can’t access meaning Telstra technicians are unable to enter to begin major work. These are changing daily.
Potential impact of Cyclone Yasi
As Brisbane and the South East moves into recovery mode, Telstra will be closely monitoring the effect from the potential impact of Cyclone Yasi in North Queensland which is expected to cross the coast today.
Replacement landline and mobile handsets
Customers in flood affected areas requiring replacement landline and mobile handsets should contact their closest Telstra Shop. Handsets are still available.
To report a fault
- Residential: 13 22 03
- Telstra Business customers: 13 29 99
- Telstra Enterprise and Government customers: 1800 815 851
sorry but we have been without a phone for 3 weeks now and our house did not suffer any flood damage. we live in the suburb of kenmore. please report the situation correctly
I also live in Kenmore, Richard, no flood damage either. No phone for 2 weeks. Since then can receive all types of calls and can make calls to mobiles and interstate numbers, but not local, Queensland, or international numbers. Keep getting told that a. there is an outage and it will be fixed by a date that appears to be fictional as it keeps moving every time we get past it or b. there is nothing wrong with my phone so the problem must be at the other end. Sorry. If I can’t call on my landline but can reach the same numbers on my mobile, and they can ring me, the problem is linked to my phone number.
Today I followed the advice of a poster on Update 10 and rang 132203 and asked to be put through to the Flood Management Section. Got put through to a guy in Perth who confirmed that there is no general outage in Kenmore (I had been told 10 minutes before that there is) and who agreed with me that this problem on my phone is clearly something at the exchange. I’m awaiting the results of his request to have senior technicians check it.
I agree with you that Telstra has been less than helpful, and totally lacking in any sort of will or capacity to tell us what the issues are. But then, Telstra clearly doesn’t tell it’s overseas call centres either.
So have a go, dial 132203 and just ask for the Flood Management Section. The guy I spoke to told me that they operate right round the clock, 7 days a week.
Hi jennifer,sorry for the late reply but have been very busy calling 132203, must be over ten times now. I have been promised on several occasions that someone will call me back within 24 hours I have yet to receive that call. My wife even went into the telstra shop in Indooroophilly where she stood on the end of their phone waiting for customer service to answer, 39 minutes later when she told a sales person that no one had answered he simply took the phone off her and redialed the number and said they are very busy, at which point she deciced to leave. I have never know such bad customer service in my life. My neighbour is suffering the same fate but at least he can make calls on his landline, he would like to receive calls but one out of two is better than none. I think telstra would say they have restored 50% of his service amazing.
Hi Richard
Part of the problem, so a Telstra executive told me many years ago, is their performance measurement standards. When you require staff to meet a standard of 95% of faults to be fixed within 48 hours it stands to reason that they will always treat the simple ones as a priority because if it can’t be fixed in 48 hours it does not harm to the performance record if it takes 6 months to fix.
I’ve had some progress since my call to the Flood Management Section. Both my phone lines are now dead as doornails. Not the result I was hoping for. Like you, promises of call backs and text messages have not be fulfilled
Another update. Honestly, I feel like Miss Marple.
Phones came back mid-afternoon. Call from a person in Melbourne. Had to go through the whole saga of explaining again (why do they take ages typing up everything you say while you wait if no-one ever reads it).
During the conversation and the subsequent call back later I gleaned some information:
a. my phone had been diverted and it took me a little while to convince him that I had not authorised that. I had already been alerted to the fact that while it appeared to be dead it just rang out. Turned out that this was a diversion to a Telstra service number. The diversion was removed but I was also told that in areas of outage (which he says Kenmore is, though the flood management section said there was no outage any more) they have diverted phones through service numbers to allow us to make and receive calls. So it would appear another diversion is still in place.
b. He asked if when I was dialling Queensland numbers I used the 07 area code.
c. He told me that they couldn’t do remote testing of the exchange so between yesterday and Monday a technician would be sent to the Chapel Hill Exchange to plug his phone into my line to check the problem.
Within a couple of minutes I received a text message saying the issue was resolved. Of course it is not fixed. It would seem that Telstra defines “resolved” to mean something like “passed on to someone else”.
So I tried dialling a local number with the 07 prefix – and it worked. Doesn’t without it. That would suggest that if/when the phone is diverted it is diverted to an interstate number, so to call locally one has to pretend one is in another state. Obviously I’m loathe to do that too often as no doubt I will be charged as if I was making an STD call.
Beggars belief that Telstra can’t explain all of this on these updates, and that despite a service management system, no one seems to know what you’ve told anyone in previous calls.
Hi Jennifer,
well miracles do happen,,even with Telstra! having written my last comment some 2hrs later a wonderful sight appeared in our st,,Yes it was a Telastra van! it stopped outside my house so i went out to tell my sad story of life without a home phone,,he said no worries,,i’m here to fix it!! he did and i am in shock,,after $$ of calls to them and many hours of time he managed to fix it in about 15 minutes,,so my advice is,,if you write again,,put your surname,they’ll look for you,,then they’ll take their white van to search and hopefully fix yours too.Good Luck,,please write to let me know how you get on.
We have been without a working phone since 11 Jan. I have reported it three times now. It has been diverted to our mobile, but the assistance package is of no use when Telstra mobiles don’t work in your area.
Well my phone issue is finally resolved, 48 hours after contacting the Flood Management Section. It should not have been so difficult to obtain the information required to explain what the problem was, and I should not have had to be so tenacious about it all.
If Telstra had been upfront in the beginning, and had used its Faults management system well enough to ensure that everyone who needed to know, including call cerntre personnel overseas, knew enough from the get go to adequately and accurately advice customers that the problems were flood related and what the work-arounds instituted consisted of, I know I, and I’m sure others, would have patiently waited for resolution.
In the event, being given various conflicting bits of information, and never being told the real story, created frustration.
Had someone explained to me that phones in the outage areas were being diverted to Telstra Service numbers I could have deduced that these were located interstate, asked the obvious question and worked out that the reason I could not reach local numbers was because the system was interpreting my attempts as coming from interstate and therefore lacking the 07 area code.
A good hard look at the decision-making process and customer relationship management is warranted.
I’m not sure where the information they’re reporting on here is coming from. Our phone has been dead since the flood, my mobile is not with Telstra so I can’t have it diverted with land line rates and mobile reception in Fig Tree pocket is dodgy at best anyway so mobile is no real substitute. What I don’t get is that our Foxtel and Cable Internet were restored almost immediately. So what is the delay with the land line? We didn’t get water in our house so it’s not a question of flood damage to our line. And now with all the work going on in Nth QLD I’ve a sneaking suspicion we are going to be forgotten about. Please please please prove me wrong Telstra.
well we were restored last friday but only for a day!! i have spoken to a dozen different people,,none of them know what they are doing! we can recieve calls through our mobile,it’s with optus but can’t make any! they only thing i can say is,,Telstra is totally USELESS!!
Hi Richard, I’ll have a local rep look into this if you can send me your account and contact numbers using this online form.
well done richard ,finally it was resolved by com tech ,ps believe me i do under stand as I do many repairs on 6 day week for telstra as a contractor .
regards garry from coomera.