From
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...014239,00.html
A MAJOR telecommunications fault shut down mobile and landline phone calls
and internet connections in Queensland and some parts of New South Wales for
four hours today.
Hospital services were hit, there were delays to flights at Brisbane Airport
and businesses were reduced to a standstill. ATMs and EFTPOS transactions
were also reportedly affected.
The problem was first noticed around 8am (AEST) and appeared to have been
fixed by noon.
Optus this morning blamed a broken fibre optic cable on the Gold Coast for
the widespread outages and said mobile phone services and all calls to and
from fixed line numbers were affected.
The fault also disrupted internet access to servers outside Queensland from
within the state. Problems were reported by customers in northern New South
Wales and users on the 3 mobile network.
Queensland Health said hospitals in the Gold and Sunshine coasts, Townsville
and the Wide Bay region were affected, but that emergency calls were not.
An Airservices Australia spokesman said there were delays at Brisbane
Airport as no data was getting through to pilots from air traffic
controllers. The backlog was expected to have been cleared by 1pm.
IT support companies have also reported a second network fault at
Stanthorpe, southwest of Brisbane.
Anger
Frustrated readers told us their businesses ground to a halt today and some
were counting the costs of lost trade and productivity with a view to
claiming compensation from Optus.
Jodie Tanner said her family's hardware store in Brendale, north of
Brisbane, had lost EFTPOS facilities at about 8.30am.
"Our customers are getting agitated because they have had to find other
forms of payment and manual transactions are taking longer to process. I
have had numerous customers leave our store this morning," she said.
Nick Behrens, Commerce Queensland state policy manager, said the cost to
business was unknown at this stage.
"Business is very much reliant on telecommunications and this creates a real
inconvenience as many more things have to be done manually and often staff
have not been trained to do this," he said.
"It also affects businesses trying to contact customers and in places like
hospitals, where they use mobile phones to page doctors, it has caused a
significant disturbance."
One reader who claimed to work for the immigration department said "urgent
stuff... like citizenship tests or visa payments" could not be processed.
Others complained about the personal toll of the outage.
"My wife just lost her mother and I am unable to call her to check how she
is going. She is very upset and feels isolated," one reader said.
Earlier, an Optus spokesperson said: "At approximately 8.00am (AEST) this
morning, a fibre optic cable was broken on the Gold Coast which affected
services in Queensland. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused
our customers."
The cause of the cable break is not yet known.
A spokesperson for Telstra said the problem was confined to the Optus
network.
"It is 100 per cent an Optus issue... They own the hardware and cable," a
spokesperson told AAP.
Optus last year said it had more than 7 million mobile customers in
Australia, but would not say today how many customers it had in Queensland.
Optus cable fault causes widespread outage 
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