Connection Lost

Filed in Recent News by July 15, 2016

WHILE some people are busy chasing Pokemon’s, others in our community are struggling to access internet banking due to the worsening data drought and to add insult to injury the government has given QANTAS free inflight wi-fi for people travelling a few hours to another major internet hub, while passing over regional people who are still disconnected.

The Upper Hunter Shire area is hardly remote Australia, but across the local area our farming families are not able to use the internet to bridge the geographic divide to the rest of the world.

Essentially they are rationed for how much data they are allowed to access each month and they are not able to choose to have unlimited data, the restricted data also restricts internet speed.

Amanda Kemp is 11 kilometres out of Merriwa and said trying to run their farm and do basic things on the internet is a constant challenge.

“I’m always getting a warning email and we don’t watch movies we don’t do any of that we are just trying to run our business,” said Ms Kemp.

“On our interim satellite we are on 30 gigabytes all up, this new one (NBN Sky Muster) is 40 during the day and the off-peak of 60 in the middle of the night,” she said.

“They tell you there is 100 gigabyte but they don’t tell you to access most of you need to run your business as 3am.

“Chris is on the executive council of the NSW Farmers and he’s often sent film clips of say something attacking a sheep and he can’t watch them properly or it chews up all the data.

“Chris and I rarely use the telephone anymore, because they expect you do everything online, the banking, Medicare, pay your bills, download forms you go online for all of that now.

“With the current system they cut back our data because people had over-subscribed and then while we have restrictions on the new system they then give free wi-fi to all QANTAS passengers,” she said.

“We are only a little problem, there are people living 300 kilometres from town educating their children and how the hell are they going to do it?

“This data drought is a big problem for regional people,” Amanda Kemp said.

Software updates are a frequent annoyance for all users of the internet, but when you have heavily restricted data, managing when you can update windows is even more of a head ache.

Dianne Mitchell, who lives 200 metres from the village of Gundy said she avoids making any software updates on her phone until she is in town near free wi-fi.

“I hold off updating my software until I am in a McDonald’s or somewhere with better access and have a coffee while that is downloading,” Ms Mitchell said.

“More politicians need to visit the country more often and try and use their mobiles or get on the internet,” she said.

“We’re forgotten and even with Telstra at the moment we have a landline that just keeps going dead and so we’ll go a week or two without having a landline and we report it but they don’t want to know anything about it.

“Sometimes when I go on to do internet banking it just takes forever and so while I am doing it I go and make a drink or watch something on tele just waiting for things to happen.

“We need access to the internet to be able to plan our business and have access to information, to keep the farm running, which is our livelihood,” Dianne Mitchell said.

Get NBN’ed

While Amanda Kemp realises being able to connect to the NBN via satellite will only marginally help with an additional 10 gigabytes of data per month, simply getting connected is proving impossible.

“We’re breeding satellite dishes at the moment,” she said.

“We have the old dish, which they thankfully didn’t take away when they installed the new dish, because the new NBN Sky Muster doesn’t work and at least we still have the old one.

“The ISP blames the NBN and the NBN blames the ISP and in the meantime the dish which was installed in May doesn’t work.

“The lady at the NBN was probably getting lots of callers like me and was frustrated and told me to get NBN’ed, so I told her to get NBN’ed and from that point nothing has happened and I’ve just given up,” Amanda Kemp said.

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