BROADBAND FAULTS ARE A CRIME

I happen to be in a valley were there is no cellphone coverage, and I have no need of one outside my home, so I am entirely dependent for phones and the Internet on my broadband line. Everything comes down that 'pipe'. If it is down, I have nothing: no phones, no email, no Internet--nothing.

My line went down on the 27th of July 2022, and did not come up till the 30th of August. That meant that I was without access to everything, unless I travelled somewhere to borrow someone else's phone fixed or mobile or get limited access to the Internet on a library computer (which did not give me access to vital accounts, was a three-hour round trip away, and sometimes Chrome was not working on it).

But on that computer I did come across this, section 157 of the Crimes Act 1961:

157

Duty to avoid omissions dangerous to life

Every one who undertakes to do any act the omission to do which is or may be dangerous to life is under a legal duty to do that act, and is criminally responsible for the consequences of omitting without lawful excuse to discharge that duty.

Therefore my outage was a criminal offence, and when I told Chorus that, there was fast action, and the fault, a broken wire, was found and fixed the next day. If the technician had come and knocked on the door and done what I had repeatedly told Chorus to do (that is to check my line all the way from the outside wall of my house to the nearest street-cabinet), the fault would have found and fixed a month or more earlier and I would not have had to endure an agonising, dangerous wait for service.

The moral of that story is that if you find yourself in that sort of situation go to the police, and tell your provider that you are, and that you have filed a complaint under section 157 of the Crimes Act 1961, Then you cannot be held hostage to bad service.