The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has revealed that 40 per cent of the 17,777 complaints it received in the first three months of the year were about Telstra.
Given Monday night’s major outage, this complaints are expected to rise higher in the current quarter.
A Telstra spokeswoman said the outage was due to “a planned upgrade to our network that didn’t go to plan and had flow-on effects.”
The majority of impacted customers were in NSW and QLD, the company explained, and neither 000 or mobile data were compromised.
“We’re sorry this occurred and we worked through the night to get things back up and running as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson said.
A further issue arose on Tuesday afternoon where a number of Telstra customers were able to call landlines from their mobiles.
“For now, just adding the area code to the start of that will fix it while we work that one out,” Telstra tweeted.
While Telstra lead the complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman for the first quarter, poor mobile coverage, and financial hardship complaints rose across the entire sector, while NBN services saw a “dramatic” spike in disgruntled users.
“While complaints about mobile services decreased this quarter, these problems continue to make up just under half the complaints we receive,” ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said.
“Given the importance of mobile phones to Australian consumers, it is concerning this proportion continued to remain high.
“Substantial increases were recorded in complaints about getting connected to an NBN service, problems with a bill, and service quality issues such as drop-outs and slow data speeds.”
Optus complaints dropped from 6,436 in the December quarter to 5,322 for the March quarter, no doubt due to the spike towards the end of last year following the mass data breach.
TPG recorded 2,400 complaints across its various carriers, such as Vodafone and iiNet.
