Telecom outages leave West Coasters praying

By PETER GRIFFIN

Residents on the South Island's West Coast fear a tragedy could be waiting to happen with regular phone outages that leave them virtually cut off from the outside world.

Last week, the Minister of Communications, Paul Swain, and the Telecommunications Users Group (Tuanz) appealed for Telecom and its rival, TelstraClear, to settle a network dispute that had left one Christchurch-based TelstraClear customer unable to make a 111 emergency call.

But residents and Telecom customers in areas along the West Coast have faced far longer phone outages for years, cutting access to 111 and all other numbers.

Mike Hall, a helicopter pilot and bed-and-breakfast owner living in Fox Glacier township, said there had been 30 phone outages in the area in the last year, some of which lasted up to 18 hours. The most recent was from Friday night to lunchtime on Saturday.

Sometimes the network would go dead in an area stretching from just north of Franz Josef Glacier all the way down to Haast, around 140km south. At other times, either of the townships might be affected.

The area surrounding both the townships had no mobile coverage and no service apart from Telecom's.

Hall said the population of Fox Glacier township was about 250, but that was bolstered at the moment by an influx of tourists. Visitors also increased the population in Franz Josef Glacier township 22km north.

"I'm very surprised there hasn't been a major incident because of loss of phone services," he said.

Hall said a recent incident in which an emergency call was placed just moments before the phones went dead brought home how dangerous the situation had become.

"Ten minutes after we got the call to take a sick person from Fox Glacier [to Greymouth Hospital], the phones went out. We were bloody lucky," he said.

Local businesses are also being hit.

Michael Glynn, owner-operator of Mountain Helicopters, estimated lost earnings had cost local businesses tens of thousands of dollars.

"It puts your business into neutral when you wake up in the morning and the phone lines are dead."

Calls to other helicopter bases could not be placed at times and phone bookings from the public were not getting through. Eftpos transactions and internet access were made impossible during the outages.

"Sometimes the only way we can make contact is by climbing [in altitude] in the helicopters and talking to one of the towns on the radio."

Jacob's River School, 40km south of Fox Glacier, has invested in an FM radio for emergency communications on Department of Conservation or marine radio bands when the phones are down.

Telecom spokesman Andrew Bristol said a meeting with residents in the area 18 months ago about their concerns had led to Telecom spending $2.5 million to lay more fibre cable and making call capacity improvements.

But he put the continued outages down to lightning strikes that hit Telecom's network of radio receivers and the units that powered them.

"We've spent tens of thousands of dollars protecting the equipment from lightning strikes, but we're never able to provide 100 per cent protection."

But an industry source who did not want to be named said most problems stemmed not from lightning strikes, but flaws in Telecom's network in the region.