Intermittent outages across the Telstra mobile network has hit across most of Broken Hill this week, with towns as far west as Bulloo Creek in South Australia also experiencing disruptions due to upgrade works.
On Wednesday, the city airport was also affected, with check-ins having to be done manually, much to the frustration of airline staff and customers waiting to board flights.
The planned Telstra maintenance has been a concern since last Saturday for mobile phone users in our region and has been impacting residents and businesses around town, with Telstra estimating the full restoration of its mobile network services will be back up from 9.30pm tomorrow – Friday, June 2.
Speaking to the Barrier Truth, a Telstra spokesperson said, “We’ve been progressively upgrading our mobile base stations in Broken Hill to 5G, to deliver faster speeds and higher capacity for our customers”.
“We notified customers via SMS that these upgrade works would require us to shut off the site for periods of time. We’ll only be switching off the site when we need to and we’ll have it back on as quickly as possible.
“There’s never a good time to undertake this sort of work but once it is completed, it will mean better mobile services for local residents. We sorry for any inconvenience this is causing and we’re working to deliver improved services as quickly as possible.”
Telstra said to improve mobile coverage, residents should use an nbn or other broadband connection to access wi-fi calling, telling us it also worked during a mobile outage and is a free setting on most popular mobile phones, allowing for people to make and receive calls with a mobile phone using a wi-fi network.
