2GB DRIVE HOST, JIM WILSON: Residents in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury are on edge. Every time they’re hit with a storm, they’re in fear of the NBN boxes blowing up. It can take weeks for them to get their internet back. And when you’re working from home like a lot of people are right now, or studying from home, if you have a business, you can’t wait weeks to get your internet reconnected. Especially when there’s areas that don’t have the best reception as it is. Many rely on their NBN boxes to be able to make calls. On the line is the area’s Federal MP, Susan Templeman. Susan, welcome back to Drive.
SUSAN TEMPLEMAN, FEDERAL MEMBER FOR MACQUARIE: Thanks Jim.
WILSON: So, what exactly is happening to these boxes? What’s causing them to keep cutting out?
TEMPLEMAN: Well, we wish we knew the exact technical reason, but something to do with a lightning strike creating a power surge that sends it through the copper on these fibre-to-the- curb installations; which is what you have all through Bowen Mountain (which you know of well), Glossodia and then the lower part of the Mountains. That power surge is going all the way through to the white box that people have in their house and it’s a random thing, but people’s boxes are frying. It’s happened once to some people, twice to some people, some people are up to their seventh box in the last couple of months. So, every time there’s a storm, we all live in fear of our boxes getting zapped and all communications going down.
WILSON: Well even a local GP practice has lost internet and that means no test results, including Covid results, no prescriptions, no pathology results, no on-the-spot Medicare rebates. I mean there’s a fair bit at stake here.
TEMPLEMAN: There’s a lot at stake. You can’t even ring up to make an appointment to go and see your GP when they’ve got no phones. And as you said it’s complicated – so often in the Mountains, and parts of the Hawkesbury – because there’s really bad mobile reception. In my house, I don’t get mobile signal unless it’s operating through my internet. When the internet goes down, we lose everything. And that’s the common experience for lots of people. You can’t even ring your internet provider and say, hey there’s a problem with my box.
WILSON: I know we spoke about this on the program late last year. NBN and Telstra, say ‘well hang on a minute, a lot of this is rugged terrain’. What do you say to that?
TEMPLEMAN: Well in this case, you know everyone knows, and we’ve always known that this area is very storm prone. So, it only happens when there’s storms and it only happens when there’s lightening and you would have thought that someone would have the common sense to design a system that protects homes from losing their connections when the lightning strikes. Now for Bowen Mountain, when the NBN came in after terrible troubles they had last year t(hat you were terrific in helping us get Telstra to listen to), the NBN sped up their roll out there and people thought, great – we now have reliable communications! We can make calls, we’ve got the internet, we can study, we can work. But of course, the system they’ve put in has a technical flaw in it. Whether it’s the box and the box itself in your house isn’t protected enough against power surge, whether it’s the pit outside your house and something’s happening where the fibre meets that copper, whatever it is, they’ve installed something that is actually creating greater uncertainty about our communications, not making it more reliable.
WILSON: So how dangerous is it when these boxes blow up?
TEMPLEMAN: Well I haven’t had a lot of people tell me they’ve just caught on fire. I had one person though, say it burnt her desk. A woman called Georgia in Glenbrook let me know that they actually marked her desk when it happened. So we don’t know and NBN won’t and hasn’t been willing to tell me how many boxes have been destroyed and zapped. But technicians, when they’re replacing boxes, have said to people they’ve got 30 or 40 to do in a single day and it can take a week or more to get a replacement box because it’s happening so frequently.
WILSON: OK and are you getting much sort of joy from the NBN on this? I mean are they listening? Are they trying to rectify the situation?
TEMPLEMAN: Well what they’ve said to date is, they think it’s only a small number of boxes. What we need them to recognise that every time a box goes down, people waste time trying to report to their internet service provider, wait for NBN to then investigate it and physica
