X
Home & Office

NBN Co, telcos continue to combat Qld flood outages

NBN Co, Telstra, and Optus have been working to restore services brought down by severe weather and flooding in Queensland and parts of New South Wales.
Written by Josh Taylor, Contributor

Services for a number of customers on the National Broadband Network (NBN) in Queensland and parts of New South Wales have been restored after severe weather and flooding in the area.

Thousands have been evacuated in the flood-stricken state after heavy rain over the long weekend.

NBN Co told ZDNet today that its biggest outage as a result of the floods came from backhaul services from a third-party provider, and affected fewer than 200 services in new housing developments in Mackay, Townsville, and Cairns.

The government-owned company said that internal checks showed that services have since been restored, but this has yet to be confirmed by the provider.

Power outages at the site of the temporary fibre access nodes in Alstonville and Pitt Town in New South Wales caused the nodes to go to backup power, but main power was restored before the service was disrupted for users.

The battery backup ran out in Kallangur, however, and this brought down 19 services, but has since been restored. The temporary fibre access now at Inala is out due to a mains power outage, and battery backup has also run out, causing 42 data and one voice service to be brought offline.

NBN Co said it is currently seeking an alternative power source.

Telstra said that its damaged redundant inland fibre cable near Harlin in Kingaroy that was swept away in a landslide has been restored overnight, meaning that landline, mobile, and broadband services have been brought back up for the South Burnett, central, and northern Queensland areas.

Telstra warned this afternoon that although the cable has been restored, localised power outages may continue to disrupt services in some areas.

Optus said this morning that its mobile network was working in all major population centres in Queensland and Northern New South Wales, but there are still a number of outages in central and south east Queensland due to power and transmission failures.

The telco said this afternoon that it is shipping additional mobile phones to far north and central Queensland to meet the huge demand for prepaid SIMs and mobile phones in retail stores in the area.

Editorial standards