Can Carolyn Cooper's luck flow this way?

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I envy Dr Carolyn Cooper for all the good luck she's been having with FLOW.

I have been without telephone and Internet service for more than five weeks with no end in sight. Altogether, that adds up to roughly 10 weeks (and counting) without service so far this year. FLOW tells me the current outage is caused by damaged cable and replacement cable needs to be sourced. They say it could be six months before service is restored ... if ever.

The most disturbing thing about this situation is not the outage. It's their lack of service transparency. The last update to my ticket was a month ago. In this day and age, it should not be difficult to regularly update subscribers in layman's terms what progress is being made on service restoration. Even when their customer service centre puts you on hold, they don't give you any indication of where you are in the queue or how long your expected wait time will be.

FLOW's website and Twitter accounts are nothing but marketing propaganda.

They could provide updates on outages that affect many people, but once again, there's no service transparency there either. Outages are a closely guarded FLOW secret. Maybe it's time for the Office of Utilities Regulation to force local utilities like communications, power and water companies to provide greater service transparency in the form of detailed outage announcements with real-time, visual information on where outages are, when service is expected to be restored, and how many are affected by outages.

I wonder if the management at FLOW realise that long service outages force people to either find alternatives or become less reliant on FLOW's service?

Orville Redman