Sick of shouting, Dorothy makes a stand

BY CLAIRE MCENTEE

All Telecom customer Dorothy Bognuda wants is a decent phone line.

Noisy calls, dropped calls and slow broadband speeds have long plagued rural residents in the Rangitikei-Manawatu region and after 15 years of patchy service, Ms Bognuda – who lives in Santoft, near Bulls – is making a stand.

She has refused to pay her latest phone bill and has sought help from local MP Simon Power.

The problem was so bad she could not have a proper phone conversation with her son, who lives a kilometre down the road, she said.

"People I'm talking to can't hear a word I'm saying so I end up virtually screaming. Sometimes you might be talking to someone and you can hear another phone ringing over and above it, and sometimes the line cuts out all together."

Frequent complaints to Telecom – including more than 30 in the past eight months – had not solved the problem.

"They're very good at sending a man out to fix it but the repairs last all of two weeks."

She said she had considered suing Telecom over the issue but did not have the resources to do so.

"My husband and I are in our 70s and we'd like to think that for the last few years we've got, our phone line is good.

"What if something happens to myself or my husband and we want to ring 111 but they can't hear us?"

A spokesman for Simon Power said he was seeking advice from Communications Minister Steven Joyce.

Mr Power had previously liaised between Telecom and constituents with similar problems.

Federated Farmers Manawatu-Rangitikei president, Gordon McKellar, said it was common for rural residents to experience problems with their Telecom landlines and internet, with some problems persisting for 10 years or more.

Residents in towns north of Feilding, including Kimbolton and Waituna-West, had had major issues and Telecom had promised to upgrade its exchanges there in 2006, but he understood little progress had been made.

Telecom had blamed electric fences for interference on phone lines but this was a cop-out, he said.

The company had not upheld its end of the Telecommunications Service Obligations deal with the Government, which required it to provide equitable access to a minimum standard of telephone services, no matter where the user lived.

"They realised that it wasn't economic and only did what they had to do when there was enough pressure from a particular area."

Robin Kelly, spokesman for Telecom's network division Chorus, said Ms Bognuda's phone services were delivered over a 22-kilometre copper link to Bulls.

Rural customers connected over long distances were more likely to be affected by network and external factors – such as the weather – because of the larger number of network components required to deliver services.

Chorus had begun to "tweak" the Santoft network and work should be completed by Wednesday, he said.

"Customers in the Santoft area should experience an improvement in the quality of their phone services once work has finished." But there were no plans to upgrade the network in Santoft.

"The reality is at this stage it is uneconomic to undertake the significant infrastructure build to upgrade the phone and broadband services in the area."

Chorus had extended broadband coverage in the region, including to Tangimoana and Himatangi beaches, and planning was under way for a network upgrade in the Kimbolton, Cheltenham and Waituna West areas to provide broadband access later this year.

"We are also two years in to a four-year programme to enable the delivery of broadband connections between 10 megabits per second and 20Mbps to 80 per cent of New Zealanders, extending to towns with 500 or more phone lines.

"Palmerston North, Whanganui, Feilding, Marton, Ashhurst, Bulls, Linton and Taihape will all benefit from this programme. To date, 89 cabinets and 103 kilometres of fibre have been deployed in the region for this project."

Federated Farmers spokesman David Broome said they received complaints about the lines network in the region "periodically".

Ring A Bell? If you've had similar problems in the Manawatu-Rangitikei region, The Dominion Post would like to hear from you. Email businessday@dompost.co.nz

- © Fairfax NZ News