Optus: Customers not important

SOCCEROOS supporters who rose early to watch the boys in green and gold play a crucial World Cup qualifying match on Thursday morning received a rude awakening when they discovered that their Optus cable and pay-TV services were not working.

A planned outage in Optus's Belrose exchange near Sydney's northern beaches knocked offline the telco's cable services including telephone, internet and pay-TV for eight hours from 11pm on September 10.

But while Optus said only a few hundred customers were affected by the outage, customers as far away as 30km reported they were without services too.

One Optus subscriber from Pennant Hills who contacted The Australian expressed their frustration that the telco failed to warn any of its subscribers about the impending outage.

"What if someone had a medical emergency and couldn't ring 000?" asked the subscriber. "In fact, I nearly had a heart attack when I was trying to figure out how to watch the Socceroos' match!"

According to an Optus spokesperson, the planned outage wasn’t important enough to warrant telling customers about it.

"This maintenance involved less than a few hundred customers and was timed to have minimal impact to them. We deemed it unnecessary to contact customers in this instance," the Optus spokesperson said.


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