There has been a chain of Telstra phone and data outages in the NT since before Christmas, with several communities and their Health Clinics being without internet, mobile or land-line phones for sometimes several days.
Across the NT many communities have had on-and-off services, and this has made it very difficult for people to buy food and petrol, and in the case of some health services meant they are relying on the back-up synchronised laptop for patient medical record access in Communicare.
In at least one instance, a medical evacuation had to be arranged completely by satellite phone, with the doctor kneeling outside with his notes, and the staff in ED with the patient shouting out replies to questions from RFDS via the Doctor.
Some services have registered up to 4 complaints with the Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman To-date this has not resolved the ongoing issues.
AMSANT has written an official letter of complaint to the Telstra CEO. Currently we are organising to meet with representatives of their top-tier management over how this can be better managed in future. We will let you all know when we have some relevant actions from this.
To better monitor progress we are working to generate a master list of outages/resolutions across the NT and are really keen to hear about any communications issues you may have. Please contact the Digital Health team with any issues.
Here are a couple of articles on the both Telstra communications and power outages that have been affecting the Territory:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-24/ampilatwatja-arlparra-mobile-outage-nt-telstra-remote-community/11898266
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/mar/04/power-outages-leave-aboriginal-people-on-nt-islands-with-no-food-fuel-or-phones-for-three-days