Difficulties solving fortnight-long Sky Muster outage bring calls for better communication

She woke up in the morning to find that her internet service hadn’t come back on, and it remained that way for the next 12 days.

A number of other people in the Yaraka, Isisford and Blackall districts reported similar outages, including Lisa Alexander at Warringah, south of Blackall.

As the project officer for the local Cultural Association, she was in the middle of organising sections of the community’s annual Heartland Festival when it all came to an abrupt halt.

“I rang my retail service provider, who spent four days trouble-shooting – they had to go through all their levels of technicians – then it was escalated to nbn, who never acknowledged a problem existed,” she said.

“They just said they couldn’t do anything and passed the buck back to the providers. It was beyond frustration.”

She had a sick horse to take to Townsville but couldn’t research the requirements for dipping it, and eventually drove to town 90km away in order to do simple things such as company banking.

One of the most exasperating parts of the ordeal, according to Lisa, was that the people experiencing the loss of service were using a number of different RSPs, but no over-riding body was collating that data and putting two and two together.

Anne-Maree agreed, saying none of the parties involved were talking to each other.

“We kept telling our service provider there was a whole group of us, all using different providers, so it couldn’t be a problem with the equipment,” she said. “They treated it as individual issues.”

Anne-Maree and her husband Jeff had organic cattle yarded for trucking but couldn’t download the paperwork for them, nor could they check AuctionsPlus prices to make marketing decisions.

"It was becoming a real issue for us,” she said. “We were real third class citizens for a while – no power (they generate their own), no mobile service and no internet.”

Anne-Maree’s shirt-making business was affected when she couldn’t access orders coming in, and work compiling a newsletter for the local community was put back.

Her closest mobile phone access is a two-and-a-half hour drive away.

When her internet service returned early this week, she was left with over 800 messages to work her way through.

She said she had rung plenty of politicians as the length of the outage wore on, including regional Communications Minister Fiona Nash and local member David Littleproud.

“There were others who listened but I don’t know that they did much,” she said.