Telstra repair work in southwest Victoria continues more than a week after a fire took out part of the telco’s exchange in Warrnambool.
“Technicians have continued working around the clock to restore landline and Internet services and have made significant progress,” Telstra said Friday.
Telstra has been working to restore service since the fire hit early morning on 22 November. Telstra has had 50 technicians on site making repairs, working across two 12-hour shifts.
Telstra said it has restored mobile voice and data services for all affected customers. The telco also has restored landline services to 58342 customers.
However, Telstra has only restored Internet service for 39 per cent of its customers, it said.
One repair worker who has worked at Telstra for 38 years wrote Thursday on the Telstra blog that he has “never seen anything like the mess I saw when I walked in the Warrnambool Exchange”.
“The works [sic] pretty tiring because you’ve got to be absolutely sure about what you’re doing, and being spot on with getting it right,” wrote the Telstra worker, Kevin Sadler.
“You start repairing at the power level, then the high order transmission boxes, then work your way down the chain,” he wrote. “You can’t connect a customer’s service back up until you’ve got all the infrastructure rebuilt to connect it in to.
“It’s been a real team effort in our repair work. You’ve got construction and maintenance blokes who are working side by side, across each other and even sometimes on top of each other!”
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