Morawa connectivity issues spark petition to take legal action against Telstra, businesses switch providers

More than 200 people from a Mid West town have signed a petition for a class action against Telstra after several outages left businesses out of pocket. The Morawa community is frustrated with the service after it cut out multiple times, leaving businesses without EFTPOS or the ability to contact customers. Shire president Karen Chappel assured the community the telecommunications company had resolved the issue and encouraged anyone affected to contact Telstra directly for compensation. “I have been in contact with Telstra and our members of Parliament to advocate on behalf of connectivity in our community,” she said. “I clearly understand the frustration in the community. I live here, I know what it’s like. Every small community across Australia has ongoing outages, it’s like your power.” Morawa Motor Hotel manager Clifton Beauchamp said the business could not invoice customers for weeks as a result of the outages and opted to change service providers. “There was business loss because we couldn’t contact people. People were leaving because the EFTPOS wasn’t working. Since we’ve gone to Starlink we haven’t had much of a problem,” he said. A Telstra spokesperson said the recent outage in Morawa was caused by a hardware fault, which took three attempts to fix, while repairs to an earlier outage were delayed because of weather conditions. “While we do our absolute best to keep the network running as smoothly as possible, unfortunately when working with technology things can go wrong,” the spokesperson said. “Having a second type of connection like NBN, satellite internet or a landline is the best way for customers to make sure they can stay connected even when a mobile outage occurs.” Telstra said it considered compensation on a case-by-case basis.