More than 900 Illawarra households were without internet or a phone connection last week as Telstra battles with a maintenance work backlog, a union official says.
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Communication Electrical Plumbing Union (CEPU) NSW/ACT Assistant Secretary Shane Murphy said it was due to the failing 100-year-old copper network and Telstra's poor efforts at maintenance and repairs.
Mr Murphy claimed 906 customers in the Illawarra were offline last week. While the region was the worst, according to figures supplied by the CEPU, the problem was being felt across the state.
In Byron Bay there were 821 offline customers, 662 in Wetherall Park, and 617 in Newtown.
"Over the past eight weeks we have seen faults and waiting times blow out," Mr Murphy said.
Some 20,000 NSW Telstra customers have been without telephone or internet services for many weeks due to "a chronic under-investment", he said.
Overworked technicians were forced to wrap yet-to-be-repaired cables in plastic bags as a short-term fix while they tried to deal with the backlog of jobs, he said.
"There are thousands of plastic bags holding cable joints together and thousands of cables laying bare with wires exposed in pits and manholes across the country."
Mr Murphy claimed the backlog had become worse since Telstra stopped Sunday work and restricted overtime payments.
"This is bad for families, bad for businesses and bad for our hardworking members who'd rather do the job right once," he said.
"Our Telstra field workers are fed up with not being able to provide a decent and permanent repair to Telstra customers with many members reporting of having to return to the same customer job due to the poor state of the copper network."
A Telstra spokesman said that due to the weather conditions, this time of year was always a busy one for repair work.
"Due to some extreme weather across the country, our fault volumes are currently higher than normal," the spokesman said.
"We are working hard to reduce delays and we apologise for the inconvenience this is causing our customers."
The spokesman also said the age of the copper network will vary from place to place.
"The age of the copper network varies greatly as it has been rolled out incrementally over time, but with the rolling remediation program we have in place to restore and replace copper it would rarely be older than 30 years," the spokesman said.
"The copper is susceptible to water and the number of faults we need to restore increases with sustained rain, however, for the vast majority of our customers the copper network provides a high quality fault-free service that is proven over time."
ghumphries@fairfaxmedia.com.au
