Telstra cable cut in road-widening project

Concreted over... again.

Telstra has restored services to 1,290 customers in the NSW Blue Mountains town of Hazelbrook after contractors widening a road cut through a key phone cable last week.

The cut took out services to Hazelbrook shops and some residential customers, according to a Telstra spokesman.

The carrier's area general manager for Sydney Metro Southwest Dom Galluccio said that the 2400-pair cable was cut about 100 metres from the exchange.

"It took us from Wednesday night [last week] to Sunday 8pm to restore services," Galluccio said.

"We were restoring 300 pairs every 12 hours. We worked around the clock".

As with a cable break at a Woolworths building site on the NSW South Coast three weeks ago, the work of field crews was complicated by the fact that the contractors had concreted over the cable breakage.

Galluccio said that "everyone in the area" was sent to work on the round-the-clock repair job, to the point where Telstra had "written to customers flagging that if any [other] faults were reported in the area during that time that there would be some delays because the techs were working to restore services" taken offline by the cable cut.

He said Telstra had provided emergency mobile connections to some customers while their services were offline.

He said the latest incident "reinforced the whole notion of dial before you dig".