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Telstra phone, internet services go offline |
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THOUSANDS of Telstra customers in Sydney have been left without internet, phone and mobile services after construction workers severed a major fibre optic cable in the city's CBD.
The outage, which is believed to have occurred late last night, has affected thousands of business and consumer customers and will last for a week.
Contractors working for Energy Australia cut through a bundle of 10,000 Telstra copper wires and some multiple-fibre optical cables near the corner of York and Erskine streets about 9.30pm (AEST) on Tuesday.
The contractors have told Energy Australia they used "Dial Before You Dig'' plans before digging, but an audit of the contractors, work equipment and procedures is being carried out.
Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton said thousands of customers across the northeast of the CBD would be without mobile, fixed and wireless services for about a week.
"There will be many thousands, the exact number we don't know because we're still plotting where this cable serves in the city,'' Mr Middleton told reporters in Sydney on Wednesday.
"We are digging out the damaged section of cable that was damaged by a jackhammer," he said.
He said 10 major copper and optical fibre cables had been damaged.
"It's gone through about 400mm of solid concrete at the moment to get to the damaged section and then we can restore the cable by pulling a new section through from Kent Street."
The work would take about a week to complete, Mr Middleton said.
Many nearby businesses were unaffected by the interruption, but staff at the Grace Hotel on York Street said their internet was still not connected late on Wednesday morning despite promises of a quick fix.
"Telstra said they would have the problem fixed by 7am, but they haven't," an employee said.
Mr Middleton said Telstra would look at helping individual customers with line redirection where possible.
"I'm not sure where the promise of 7am would have come from, because at that stage, as we are at the moment, we're still trying to assess the full extent of the damage and get the new cable in."
An Energy Australia spokesman said the contractors responsible had been digging trial holes as part of cable upgrade works in the CBD associated with the new city north electricity substation.
"We are concerned about the incident and are conducting a thorough investigation into the contractors' activities," the spokesman said in a statement.
"We want to determine what happened, how it happened and whether the contractors did everything by the book."
The company would take action if the correct steps had not been followed, he said.
"Energy Australia apologises on behalf of the contractor because we understand this has caused considerable inconvenience to Telstra customers."
Telstra and Energy Australia have launched an investigation into the incident.
Affected customers should contact Telstra on 13 22 03.
It's gone from bad to worse for the nation's dominant telco after the Rudd government yesterday gave Telstra an ultimatum to split its wholesale and retail businesses or face government intervention in the form of forced functional separation and a ban from acquiring additional wireless spectrum necessary to evolve its NextG mobile network.
Source: AustralianIT.news.com.au
Correspondents in Sydney | September 16, 2009
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