Cade Lucas
A five day NBN outage in Tarneit is over with services resuming on Wednesday morning.
It’s understood internet coverage returned to the suburb at about 9.30am on February 28, having been out since the morning of Friday February 23.
About 1,650 premises in Tarneit have been affected by the outage which is believed to have began as a scheduled outage, before extending much longer than expected.
An NBN spokesperson confirmed services in Tarneit had resumed.
“The outage has been resolved,” they said.
“We’ve had to replace 1.2 kilometres of cable and that is now complete.”
The cable needed to be replaced after it was damaged in multiple sections, though it is unclear as to how the damage occurred.
Noise restrictions in residential areas meant the outage took longer to repair as excavation works needed to replace the cable could only be done in daylight hours.
The NBN spokesperson apologised to Tarneit residents for the outage and the length of time taken to fix it.
“We know unplanned outages or inconvenient and frustrating and we appologise for the inconvenience.”
Among those inconvenienced was software engineer Madhukar Pedagani who lives in Emerald Park Estate in Tarneit.
“I work at home, i need high speed internet and my life revolves around the internet, not just work,” he said.
“The doorbell and CCTV cameras need internet because they’re connected to wifi. The vacuum cleaner is connected because it’s a robo vacuum, my printer as well. I couldn’t use any of it.”
Along with his wife and child, Mr Pedagani shares his home with his mother who he said was particularly inconvenienced.
“My mum doesn’t have a mobile phone, she just uses the internet but she couldn’t use it to contact people.”
A customer of Aussie Broadband, Mr Pedagani said his internet provider kept referring to the outage as a ‘complex issue’, but that otherwise he was kept in the dark.
Aussie Broadband were contacted for comment.
After getting by using internet from his mobile phone and also spending two days working from an office, Mr Pedagni was grateful to see his coverage return on Wednesday morning.
“I’m very relieved. Absolutely.”
