DARTMOUTH’S broadband and fixed line phone problems are being fixed, but nothing can yet be done about the town’s mobile service blackspot.
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That was the commitment yesterday of Telstra Country Wide central Victoria and Sunraysia general manager Steve Tinker.
Mr Tinker said Telstra workers were likely to spend up to another week in the town fixing its service problems.
On Wednesday he addressed a meeting at the Dartmouth Hotel organised by residents frustrated by the town’s phone problems.
They have been putting up with no mobile phone coverage, public phones that don’t work and land lines that fail when it rains.
Mr Tinker welcomed contact from residents about the issues faced.
“From there we instigated a bit of an investigation to find out what that was,” he said.
Mr Tinker said some of technical staff travelled to Dartmouth to inspect the copper network.
“We found some faults, some network issues in the cable,” he said.
“We plan to get those rectified, which we are doing as we speak.
“Faults happen and we endeavour to restore services as soon as we can and follow up with some maintenance.”
Mr Tinker said broadband issues were also being addressed.
“It’s a small community and they’ve had ADSL broadband for some time,” he said.
“As of June this year we’ve done an upgrade to increase the connection back into the broader network, which creates more speed.
“We have had a project in place for April next year to be completed in late 2015 to provide additional transmission to the Dartmouth exchange, but also to provide ADSL2.”
Mr Tinker said the community was “really pleased” to hear of this internet work.
But the town’s major issue of mobile phone services just could not be fixed straight away.
“Unfortunately it is a blackspot,” he said.
“We’ve got a massive network of 2.3 million square kilometres across Australia, but there is always going to be areas where there is no service.
“We’d love to be able to do it, but it becomes an economic viability decision.”
Mr Tinker said the federal government had recognised this with its $100 million mobile blackspot program.
Dartmouth was recently named as a blackspot that could be fixed under this program.
He said he understood community anxiety over the issues.