Topic:Telecommunications Services Industry
Telstra says its cabling was damaged in a bushfire near Weipa on Saturday evening. (Supplied: Chad King)
Phones across western Cape York were down again this morning just hours after services were restored following a bushfire which crippled the network over the weekend.
Businesses and community leaders are calling for better solutions for telecommunications in the bush.
Telecommunications across western Cape York suffered another outage this morning just hours after services were restored following a bushfire which crippled the network over the weekend.
Telstra northern Queensland general manager Rachel Cliffe said the latest outage was the result of a "secondary power-related fault" at a base at Mapoon, north of Weipa.
Telstra has confirmed the latest five-hour outage was caused when the site's battery backup was exhausted after a power outage in the area.
All services across the region have been restored after Telstra sent a technician to connect the tower to a portable generator.
"Some of our bigger sites have more power backups and some of our smaller sites don't, it's all engineered for the power reserves that are needed," Ms Cliffe said.
"Typically it's the power reserves needed before we can get a technician to that site before it goes down.
"We again apologise … this is a secondary fault to the one we had related to the bushfire on Saturday through Sunday."
That outage saw mobile phone reception affected in the towns of Weipa, Mapoon and Aurukun as well as Mission River, Napranum and Rocky Point, with services down for almost 30 hours.
Customers were unable to make any calls, including to Triple Zero (000), from around 5pm on Saturday evening until 10pm last night.
Ms Cliffe has defended the time it took to restore services, saying crews needed to be deployed from Cairns to repair significant damage to infrastructure.
"Unfortunately, a bushfire burnt our pit and burnt our optic fibre that was in the pit," she said.