Some Poukawa residents are still without broadband internet access today after an outage during last weekend's wet weather.
Peter Dalrymple has been unable to use the internet in his home since 4pm Sunday and was told by Telecom the problem was caused by water from the weekend's heavy rains.
The outage hasleft Mr Dalrymple frustrated. "You can't do banking, you can't look after anything you need to," he said.
The problem wasn't limited to Telecom customers as the technical fault was located in a road-side cabinet in the Poukawa area owned and maintained by network provider Chorus.
Chorus spokesman Robin Kelly said there was a fault in the cable supporting the cabinet that provided broadband internet to 26 households.
Most of the households affected by the outage had broadband restored yesterday, however, about six households were still without internet access this morning. Technicians would continue to fix the problem today and internet services were expected to be up and running by this afternoon.
The cause of the outage was unknown. "We're not sure if it's weather-related at this moment. Heavy rainfall can get into the network, but it's only broadband that's affected so I don't believe it was water-related," Mr Kelly said. But Mr Kelly said weather could be responsible for other network problems in the area over the weekend.
Jilesh Kumer was unable to connect to the internet at his Otane business and home since Saturday and was without internet connection until Monday evening when Telecom replaced his modem. "My internet kept disconnecting. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't do any payments or do any personal stuff like surfing the net," he said.
It was the third time he had experienced problems with the internet connection and each time had been during bad weather.
Mr Kelly said Mr Kumer's difficulties were likely to be a separate issue and others in the area could have experienced network disruptions due to the weather. "There are a number of faults from time to time that could be weather-related issues with water getting into the network. All utilities faced the challenge of severe weather and when you have a lot of rainfall water levels in the ground rise and can get into cables and get into the network," Mr Kelly said.
