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If anyone is going to answer the phone, you’d think it would be a phone company.
But Corrimal’s Graham Edwards has been finding Moruya-based Southern Phones impossible to contact since his internet connection dropped out nearly two weeks ago.
Mr Edwards reckons he’s tried calling Southern Phone “at least 50 times” since he lost his internet – and every single time he’s called for the past week and a half he gets an engaged signal.
He’s tried several different numbers listed on the Southern Phone website – including the technical help line – at various times of the day and night but all to no avail.
The only time he didn’t get an engaged signal was when he called that technical help line – a recorded message told him to ring back during office hours.
“My phone still works but I’ve had no internet and I cannot raise them by phone or email,” Mr Edwards said.
“They are impossible to raise. They’ve usually been pretty good – I think they might have gone belly up.
“I have sent them emails to their email address asking them to contact me urgently but it’s all fallen on deaf ears.”
The Mercury has not found any evidence that Southern Phone has gone “belly up”.
Numerous efforts to contact the South Coast company by phone and email met with the same problems Mr Edwards has been dealing with for almost two weeks.
Each number the Mercury called repeatedly returned an engaged signal and efforts to email the company via links at two different places on their website yielded no response.
The Southern Phone website makes no mention of any problems.
Mr Edwards has since made a complaint to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.
It appears Mr Edwards’ problem is far from unique – a third party website called Product Review includes pages of complaints from customers with internet outages and difficulties contacting Southern Phone.
A person identifying themselves as a “Southern Phone Official” has posted responses to a number of these complaints.
“We have been extremely busy recently which has led to some customer [sic] having trouble reaching us,” they commented to an angry customer on Tuesday, “and we are currently upgrading our systems to improve our call volumes and wait times as quickly as possible.”
