Tuesday 15 July 2008

What, no Macca?

Thousands of Cairns Optus customers have had their internet, mobiles and telephones cut off all morning. It's expected to be back on line by midday.

This was a major service cut to the north of Queensland by Australia second largest telco, which has been attributed to a damaged fiber-optic cable in NSW. All of Optus' Queensland customers have been affected.

The disruption also affected John McKenzie's morning talk-back radio show. Both 4CA and 846 AM radio stations use Optus for their telecommunications. Even though they expected to be reconnected by 12 midday, McKenzie said this didn't happen. "They [Optus] promised us, but it's after 12 now, and nothing," he announced on air.

Scanning the radio stations this morning, I noticed more than the usual flood of advertisements and 1970's top ten playing on Macca's morning show. There were no callers and hardly any of John's sultry dulcet tones over the airwaves, extolling all that is unjust in our fair city. Nor was he there to read us the Cairns Post cover-to-cover to us? Had the world gone mad?

It was like my morning Weetbix without milk - dry and tasteless, instead of wet and soggy. I really don't know what I'd prefer.

PS: I'm with Telstra, and in the last seven years, I cannot recall an outage like this.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you know how peed off I was personally this morning, having No mobile, No home phone and the worst thing, NO INTERNET!!! It was like my world had collapsed... (how sad)

Anonymous said...

Get a life Melody!!

Anonymous said...

I realise you get much of your "news" from Macca, but you're missing important stories in the community.

Macca has been relentlessly promoting "The Boulevarde" at the suburb no one will say, Manunda. The project has collapsed (a more dense group of rabbit warrens hasn't been proposed anywhere in Cairns, so good riddance). However it's collapsed because of the massive effort CEC is making to rake in some money before THEY collapse.

Then there's Hedley. They just finished a "luxury" project at Trinity Beach, called Vue. Of the almost 100 units, FIVE have been sold. This means that tradies, who have millions in unpaid bills sitting on Hedley's desk, are stuck. And look around town and look at all the other Hedley buildings under construction, but with virtually no presales, and the conclusion is self-evident.

Forget about a couple airline flights from Japan, the whole rug is about to be pulled out from under us when thousands are made redundant by the collapse of these two major developers. All because of the greed of the owners, trying to "corner the market" and drive out any competition.

Anonymous said...

I think there was something in todays ComPost on the sale of "Boulevarde" after being purchased only last year by CEC?

FIVE units in the Trinity Beach project may be good as I was told a few months ago there had been NONE. progress on the Hedley building on The Esplanade (between Tradewinds and Holiday Inn) seems to have almost stopped.

And interesting this week that my neighbour, who takes in short term accomodation, has just lost a UK backpacker tiler tenant as there is no longer any work from Hedley where he had been employed.

May we live in interesting times as the Chinese would say ..... have to ask KB on that one I guess as he is the local China expert :-)

Anonymous said...

Its quite interesting reading your comments about Hedley and its lack of sales of units.
I just happen to be one of the first to have been relieved from my post at Hedley.

I was one of their project architects that was heavily involved in Vue. At first I took it personally but then soon realised it was much more than that.

Anonymous said...

Conveyancing clerks employed by solicitors are currently having their employment terminated in droves. Yep, Cairns has gone "bust" again, but that is how it has been since the 1980s....a series of boom and bust.