mmg.com.au

Nearly 150 homes in Shepparton are without phone services due to a hardware fault.

Telstra spokesman James Howe said the fault was affecting about 140 landlines in the north Shepparton area.

North Shepparton resident Srdjan Jeftic contacted The News after experiencing two service outages last month, one that lasted five days.

‘‘It’s terrible. We’ve been in Serbia, in Belgrade when we were under sanctions of United Nations (and) telephones were working perfectly,’’ Mr Jeftic said.

‘‘It was nearly war time over there (and) no outage with telephones.’’

Mr Jeftic said he was advised by a Telstra customer service representative that the first outage, from December 13 to 17, was due to scheduled maintenance, but said he had received no warning that works were to be done.

He said he had no explanation for the second outage, which has been ongoing since December 29, despite several phone calls to the service provider.

Mr Howe said services were expected to be restored tomorrow, once Telstra received delivery of new hardware.

‘‘These sort of faults do occur from time to time and we certainly apologise for the inconvenience to customers,’’ Mr Howe said.

‘‘We do keep a large inventory of spares for these sorts of incidences, however depending on the number of issues that do occur we do have to wait for deliveries from time to time.’’

He said Telstra had no record of any faults between December 13 and 17.

Mr Jeftic said he was shocked the issue had yet to be resolved.

‘‘In the 21st century, to have an outage of five days, with everything (now) being resolved by computers ... and they can’t resolve the problem within five days? That’s a surprise,’’ he said.

‘‘That’s not the right way to do business.’’