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Around a thousand residents on the southern end of Queensland's Russell Island have been left without mobile coverage and unable to call triple zero for days due to an Optus outage.
It comes after another Optus outage left the same area in a mobile blackspot for 10 days from Christmas Eve until January 2.
An Optus spokesperson told 9news.com.au the telecommunications company was aware of the issue, adding the latest outage was due to a "radio fault".
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Russell Island, which sits between North Stradbroke Island and the Queensland mainland south of Brisbane, is home to 3700 residents and two mobile phone towers.
A Telstra phone tower sits on the northern end of the island and an Optus tower in the south.
Local real estate agent Chris McGregor lives on the southern end of Russell Island – within 500 metres of the Optus tower.
Like all residents living on the southern end of the island, McGregor is unable to get any mobile signal from Telstra on his phone.
The latest Optus outage means he has had no mobile phone coverage since Saturday, leaving him unable to make any calls while at home.
McGregor said the outages had left him frustrated but also deeply concerned about what could happen in an emergency if he, or one of his neighbours, was unable to call for help in an emergency.
"I was talking to someone this morning, this lady has a DVO out against someone," McGregor said.
"He was driving around her house last night, she couldn't ring the cops.
"Also, the average age on the island is 57. So it's quite likely that an elderly person could have a fall and not be able to get through."
A video filmed by McGregor's wife shows him unsuccessfully attempting to call triple zero via both the Telstra and Optus networks.
Like many residents, McGregor pays for both Optus and Telstra mobile services, to increase his coverage across the whole island.
"I sat down with my wife last night and thought I am going to find out what happens," McGregor said.
"I rang triple zero from Optus and I rang triple zero from the Telstra number and the phone just wouldn't ring on either one of them."
Mobile phones in Australia re-route to competing mobile networks when a caller dials triple zero and their chosen network is not available.
However, as there are no other available networks in south Russell Island for mobile phones to re-route to when calling emergency services, McGregor's call failed to connect in both instances.
In addition to south Russell Island residents not being able to call triple zero, the Optus outages have proved to be a problem for local SES (State Emergency Service) workers during a period of storms and wild weather.
Commenting on social media during the first Optus outage, a local SES volunteer said he had been unable to respond to callouts because he was not receiving alerts or alarms.
"I am getting my alert 30 minutes after the alarm goes off," he wrote.
An Optus spokesperson said in a statement engineers were working to fix the problem highlighted by the latest outage.
"Technicians have been on site but heavy rainfall has made restoration difficult," the spokesperson said.
"As soon as it is safe to do so, we will make the necessary repairs.
"Customers should still be able to call triple zero where there is coverage from other network providers."
Affected Russell Island residents were sent text messages by Optus notifying them of work taking place on the network between January 25 and February 2.
However, residents reported not receiving the messages because of the outage, with one local telling 9news.com.au she only got the SMS when she travelled to the mainland.
Optus came under fire last week after revealing 2697 customers were unable to call triple zero during its national outage in November last year.
That number was more than 10 times the 228 customers originally thought to be impacted by the 14-hour outage.
McGregor said the situation on Russell Island was incredibly frustrating because, unlike the national outage, "we are talking weeks here, not hours".
Optus installed its tower on Russell Island in 2020, with the help of $500,000 in Federal Government funding through its mobile blackspot program.
Before the tower was installed, residents had endured devastating bushfires with no mobile coverage.
Redland City Council Mayor Karen Williams said the Optus outage was an urgent issue facing residents.
"It is critical our often isolated island communities have access to fundamental lifesaving communications," Williams said.
"This is disaster management 101 so once I was made aware, we immediately used our local disaster management group to elevate the urgency of fixing this critical issue with Optus."
