Telstra digs a

By Kirra Livingstone

TELSTRA has plunged Beerwah into an unprecedented connectivity black hole with upgrade delays set to leave residents and businesses without critical access to basic phone and internet services until later this week.

Upgrades that were meant to take a few days and be completed in early June are now dragging on as frustrated locals count the cost ahead of anticipated ongoing outages.

Businesses say they are thousands of dollars in the red with downed EFTPOS services denying retailers crucial trade while also leaving customers frustrated. Turning to cash has also proven fruitless with ATMs only intermittently working and Woolworths unable to provide cash out for fears they will run out of money.

Others raised safety concerns saying they were unable to reach staff at critical times.

In response to the outages, Telstra said customers should connect their systems to NBN or Wi-Fi.

Telstra contacted customers twice last month including on May 23 stating ‘your mobile service may be impacted’ for eight days, while a day later a text informed customers there would be six days of ‘impact’ from May 29.

The Glasshouse Chamber of Commerce asked businesses how they were impacted and received a deluge of complaints (see graphic).

GC&M News also spoke to a number of businesses in the town.

“The loss of trade has been massive, we’ve had a lot of customers come in from outside of Beerwah not knowing about the outages, and then were unable to buy anything,” That Little Dress Shop Owner

Billie Glover said. “Saturday is usually my busiest day, but last Saturday due to my EFTPOS not working and no one having cash, my usual profits were down by 90 per cent.”

Retailers at Beerwah’s Village Marketplace said even if the business wasn’t affected, their customers were.

“Most of the frustrations from a customer perspective have been they have been unable to access their funds, they will come to buy something and then won’t be able to transfer money, so they have to choose to go without,” Coffee Club Beerwah owner, Mark Blong (pictured right), said.

Plus Fitness assistant manager, Thespina Brown, said her EFTPOS had been down for days. “I can’t process overdue payments either so when people come in to reconcile their debts I can’t take their money, and we also don’t have a till because we are a cashless business,” she said.

“We have half a dozen people who haven’t completed their sign-up process since the outages began, this week alone we have lost roughly $600 but if you consider the loss of ongoing payments, it’s in the thousands.”

Clarke & Co Real Estate Executives’, Andy Phythian, said they had been unable to communicate with clients for days.

“Probably the biggest thing which has impacted us is making calls, because we are on the phone all the time for our job ... it has been slowing us down,” he said.

“When we go to properties to do scheduled viewings and open homes, just trying to call the owner to tell them we are done, sometimes we’ve had to come back to the office and send them a message on WhatsApp to let them know.”

The Local’s Steph Shipman said: “There’s