Makarau residents isolated
Residents say lives are at risk due to the lack of coverage.
Last month Makarau residents were left with no home phone service or broadband after their rural connection through Compass Communications was out for a number of days.
This was a huge issue as residents do not get cellphone coverage. Some business owners reported losing money and clients but, for one resident, the issue became much more serious when her child needed medical help.
Joanne Lourie has been living in the area for 15 months and faced a ‘‘devastating’’ incident during the outage.
On the weekend of June 23, Lourie’s daughters Emelia, 5, and Ellena, 7, became unwell.
‘‘Emelia had febrile convulsions and temperatures of 42 which can be deadly. We are lucky I am a nurse and was able to run cool downs and monitor her.’’
Both girls were admitted to a medical centre on the Sunday. Lourie said the outage happened on Friday and was out until Wednesday, and then again on the Sunday.
‘‘Outages have happened around 11 times since I moved. We have pregnant women, elderly people, young children and farmers out here, this type of incident is bound to happen again. We pay the same rates and it was not cheap to join Compass, surely a bigger company like Telecom or Vodafone could help.’’
Residents are five kilometres from the Kaukapakapa exchange.
‘‘They reimbursed me $9.23 which is ridiculous - some people have lost thousands and lives were at risk.’’
Connecta’s General Manager (which is the wireless connection of Compass) Peter Mancer said they were faced with issues they had never had before.
‘‘The back-haul connection to Warkworth failed. We sent technicians but it was too unsafe to climb the tower and once we got the equipment replaced there was other technical challenges.’’
Mancer said there are always challenges in getting the internet to the tower.
‘‘This is why other companies do not jump on board. To avoid this again we plan to install a second link as we understand how reliant people are on these connections. We did our best and are doing our best to make connections more reliable.’’
He said residents need to understand in rural areas they cannot offer the same fibre or DSL services because they do not have wire in the ground and have to rely on the towers and back-haul.
‘‘It was devastating, my youngest daughter needed an ambulance on the Saturday and we had no way to get help.’’
Joanne Lourie