Internet woes cut off town
For months, Woodville residents have been plagued by unexplained, seemingly random disconnections when they try to use the internet.
Rowena Fry says she has lost her connection multiple times a day on both her home and work internet, which are on separate providers – Vodafone for her home network and Callplus at Agnes Auto Services garage, which she runs with her husband.
Neither internet service provider could find a reason for the problem, so she took to a Woodville community Facebook page in frustration.
She quickly discovered she wasn’t the only one in the small Tararua town having problems. Twenty-three people replied to her post, reporting the same problem all over Woodville with nearly every internet service provider in the town.
Some reported having occasional disconnections for more than a year, but the frequent drop-outs had started within the past six months.
Fry said it happened so often her internet connections were practically unusable.
‘‘I’ve never experienced outages like this . . . It’s happening all throughout the day, making it completely unreliable.’’
Since both her ISPS had referred her to Chorus, and with so many people affected, Fry thought maybe there was a problem with the local internet infrastructure – so she checked in with Chorus.
Spokesman Nathan Beaumont said Chorus tested the Woodville network, but hadn’t found anything wrong.
‘‘The best thing for people to do is talk to their internet service providers. If there are any issues, a fault can be lodged with us to investigate.’’
Bronwyn Bauer said she was tired of bouncing back and forth between Chorus and Vodafone. The company should be investigating on behalf of its customers, she said.
‘‘I’ve given up phoning them about it – you just get the same response every time.
‘‘It’s their responsibility because they’re providing the service, but everyone’s just passing the buck.’’
Bauer’s tried every suggestion
Vodafone tech support gave her and none of it worked. The calls always ended with the Vodafone worker telling her they couldn’t find a problem, so maybe it was her modem, and sending her a new one, she said.
‘‘It’s really frustrating. Now I’ve got two extra routers sitting in my cupboard that are perfectly fine, but still don’t have a reliable connection.’’
Chris Archer, a Voyager customer, was one of the people who’d been having occasional disconnections for more than a year.
‘‘[But now] it happens repeatedly, every day. I can get a connection for one to two hours at best on one of the better days.
‘‘It’s frustrating and confusing. There’s so many components and companies involved, you just can’t know where the problem lies.’’
Voyager spokeswoman Vicky Laird said its Woodville customers had complained about disconnections in the past, most recently in August 2017.
‘‘We’ve looked into their connections and there has been some reconnecting, although nothing excessive.’’
Spark communications adviser Lydia Tebbutt said the telecommunications company was looking into the problem.
‘‘We apologise for any inconvenience our customers may be experiencing, and we’re keen to do all we can to get this sorted for them.’’
In general, customers on the copper network, like most of Woodville, reported more faults than customers who’d made the move to fibre, she said.
However, Chorus didn’t have Woodville scheduled to get fibre until an ultra-fast broadband push in 2021.