Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The House has heard me complain about regional telecommunication services on a number of occasions. Today I rise again to put on record my disappointment at the contempt shown towards regional customers by a major telco.

The district council of Loxton Waikerie and the councils of Berri Barmera and Renmark Paringa are all customers of Telstra's CSX cloud services product. That service went down unexpectedly three weeks ago, meaning that those councils lost access to data, phone, email and electronic systems, affecting critical functions of those councils and the 35,000 residents in the region. From property settlements, development applications, dial before you dig requests and cemetery requests through to making payments to contractors, the outage is having a profound effect on the community.

Despite having a service agreement that allows outages of no more than two hours, it's now been—wait for it—23 days. While Telstra is phasing out this cloud service and customers have already begun transitioning to a new service, this doesn't negate the need for them to meet their contractual obligations. I'm watching very closely and I'll be making sure these communities are compensated, so a word out to the board of Telstra.