Their power may be back on, but tens of thousands of NSW homes and businesses are still struggling to get back online after an NBN outage that provided the first major test of new outage reporting requirements that have, based on user feedback, seemingly failed.

The outages began last week after ferocious storms ripped through city areas and the Newcastle/Hunter region – and then, on the weekend, regional areas including Port Stephens, Maitland, and the Snowy Valley, prompting declaration of natural disaster zones.

NSW State Emergency Service (SES) handled over 7,500 calls about fallen trees, damaged property, and stranded cars – yet with the electrical storms cutting Internet services to over 250,000 premises and many still disconnected days later, online forums were filled with complaints.

“We haven’t had Internet since Wednesday night about 8pm,” said one Blue Mountains area Telstra customer, who is working from the local library because there is no mobile network coverage at their house, adding that Telstra has provided “no estimate when service will be restored.”

Another user said they and their neighbours had lost power around 9pm Wednesday, then spent an hour in Exetel’s support queue before “humouring” the technician through futile troubleshooting steps all while knowing the problem was on NBN’s side.

Telcos are supposed to do better

Service outages are one thing, but being left wondering about their cause and resolution is so common that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) recently introduced new rules requiring telcos to update customers six-hourly during major outages.

Following on from the day-long Optus outage, the new rules – which took effect on 31 December – require telcos to update their websites with information about outages impacting 100,000 or more services, and to regularly update customers as repairs progress.

“Telcos are not always as responsive with information during a major outage as they should be,” ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said at the time.

“These new rules will ensure that telcos keep the lines of communication open, and that people… aren’t left in the dark.”

Feedback during the current outages suggests that telcos still have a long way to go to meet ACMA’s new expectations.

“We haven’t even been given the grace of being notified our internet is out,” one Reddit user said, recalling that “last time we had a major outage, the only communication we received was through the news a day or two later” when a cable cut was outed as the cause.

“The internet is still treated like a luxury instead of an essential service, which for many it is,” they said.

Still figuring out the best update strategy

Four days after the first storms, NBN Co had reportedly reconnected over 219,000 services across NSW – with over 36,500 premises still affected by network outages or damaged access devices – yet its network outages page and media release archive offer no updates.

One Reddit user slammed the “woeful” lack of updates from iiNet – which texted them about the outage shortly after service dropped out at around 8:30pm Wednesday night, sent a similar message Thursday morning, then went 24 hours without further information.

And while iiNet maintains a page listing dozens of Mass Disruption Notices due to past severe weather events, the NSW storms are not included in this list and its Outages and Network Services page directs customers to check with NBN Co first.

“It boggles my mind that NBN cannot be bothered to provide more detail on its outage status page,” the poster said, noting that NBN had offered little guidance but that enquiries had revealed the outage was due to power cuts interrupting services along the network.

Power distributor Ausgrid, by contrast, had proactively updated its outage page with details about its ongoing work to restore power, leading the user to wonder “Why is [power distributor] Ausgrid so much better at this than our national broadband provider?”

Communications Alliance CEO Luke Coleman agreed, telling Information Age that “energy resilience is critical to telecommunications network resilience” – and that power failures caused 88 per cent of all telco outages during the disastrous 2019-2020 bushfires.

Resilient critical infrastructure is one of the industry organisation’s three strategic pillars this year, Coleman said, promising continued work “to improve collaboration between the telco and energy sectors to keep Australians connected during natural disasters.”

NBN Co and ACMA were contacted for comment but had not responded by press time.