NBN rural customers lose satellite connection, technicians forced to turn it off and on again
Updated
A failure of the National Broadband Network (NBN) Sky Muster satellite left about 65,000 consumers across regional and remote Australia without internet access for about two hours last night.
The problem occurred just a day before tonight's decommissioning of the NBN's Interim Satellite Service (ISS), which Sky Muster is replacing.
NBN Queensland spokeswoman Kylie Lindsay told the ABC reliability was an ongoing issue with Sky Muster and that NBN was investigating what caused the latest failure, which happened about 6:00pm.
"Our priority, of course, is to always get people back online as quickly as possible," she said.
"There is no problem with the satellite — it was a technical issue on the ground.
"We've done all sorts of things like a number of different upgrades and the feedback we are getting from consumers is the reliability is improving."
Internet services resumed after technicians in Melbourne shut down and restarted the system.
Consumer advocate Kristy Sparrow said reliability is a huge issue with Sky Muster and it has to be sorted.
"Every outage causes great angst in the bush," she said.
"Some people are hanging off switching to Sky Muster because they're worried about reliability, but they really need to put that aside because they will have no connection as of tonight.
"I know of people who tried to connect to Sky Muster in 2015 who are still not connected due to the cancellation of up to 10 planned installations."
Ms Sparrow said the NBN had made great efforts in recent months using helicopters to connect people in the Kimberly and other remote areas, but the wet season had made it difficult.
The Sky Muster satellite services about 240,000 people, including anyone with no access to fixed-wire or fixed-line services, which can also include people living on the fringe of urban areas.
About 40,000 people across the nation have moved from ISS to Sky Muster or other technologies.
The NBN said there were several hundred people who had not yet switched over or made other arrangements, who will have no internet service from tomorrow.
Topics: internet-technology, telecommunications, regional, rural, brisbane-4000, qld
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