From: Martin Sims [mjsims@bigpond.com] Sent: Monday, 22 September 2003 11:19 PM To: ECITA, Committee (SEN) Subject: Submission Telstra I am writing to express my concern on the government's plan for further sale of Telstra. My family and neighbours currently receive a very poor service from Telstra. However, I believe that a fully privitised carrier will neglect regional and rural Australia in pursuit of high profitability in big business and by servicing only the areas of high population density. To illustrate my point, the following are the problems we have experienced with our telephone service over the past 2 years: a) a cable jointing pit left open to the weather in our neighbour's paddock (recently fixed after 5 years) resulted in us losing our telephone service each time it rained until the water dried out of the cable. b) We and fifteen of our neighbours were connected to the Bega Telephone exchange using pair-gain equipment sharing five trunks. Congestion was a common occurrence, preventing both outbound and inbound calls. At one stage because of cable faults the number of available trunks to the exchange was reduced to two. It was virtually impossible to make a call. c) After much complaining, Telstra removed our telephone from the pair-gain equipment and gave us a direct line to the exchange. But, this is at the expenses of our neighbours, who now share four trunks among fifteen users. It only takes a couple of people to connect to the internet at peak times to bring this system to a standstill. d) Over the past nine months we have had two telephone outages of at least five days duration. e) the cable infastrusture in our district was installed thirty-two years ago and is now sadly in need of refurbishment. How would a privatised carrier looking to maximise shareholder wealth spend money to upgrade the infrastructure to support 16 users, 12km from the exchange? -- Martin Sims mjsims@bigpond.com Ph 02 6492 1886 Fax 02 6492 0701 Mob 0409 150 468 726 Snowy Mountains Highway Numbugga via BEGA NSW 2550