Community & Business
18 February, 2025
NBN outage halts business
Miller Street and the surrounds experienced a total internet blackout for locations connected to a wireless NBN network.
Local businesses were heavily disrupted in Gilgandra on Tuesday, February 11 by an NBN outage that caused widespread internet disruption across town.
Miller Street and the surrounds experienced a total internet blackout for locations connected to the NBN network.
Several businesses, including Bendigo Bank, were forced to close once electronic till, eftpos machines, and any other internet dependent devices stopped working.
The newsagent, Gil News and Gifts, were also heavily affected. “We have no wi-fi,” began a representative of the business, [also referring to the complete lack of useful 4G data mobile reception in the main street] “[we’ve] had to write down every transaction by hand.
“We have to write out every single barcode and only sell things if they have a price tag.
“Once there’s connection again, we’ll have to go through and manually put through every transaction [into the till computer],” they said.
Furthermore, the lotto ticket dispenser kept disconnecting, automatically security locking and requiring a call to Sydney to fix. Hayden Whiteman, responsible for a petition to Telstra regarding their service around town, called the telcom in the early morning. He was told that the issue was a power outage to a nearby NBN node. A technician arrived in town around midday to investigate the issue, and an electrician was later called out to reconnect the node.
Tom O’Dea, head of nbn local in NSW, wrote to The Gilgandra Weekly, commenting that: “a power outage affected nbn services for about 66 homes and businesses in Gilgandra late Monday night (February 10).
“The disruption was due to a power outage that affected an FTTN (fibre to the node) street cabinet. A field technician arrived Tuesday morning and after finding no power supply to the node, an electrician was called to restore mains power to the power pole for the cabinet with work completed early morning.”
Connection was restored by business opening hours on Wednesday, February 12 - the next morning.
“We are sorry for the disruption,” Mr O’Dea continued. “We are delivering network upgrades to expand the fixed wireless nbn surrounding Gilgandra.”
