North Canterbury residents are venting their frustration over an internet outage they say has lasted longer than a week.

Chris Lynch Media has been inundated with messages from residents in Swannanoa, Rangiora, Cust, and Oxford.

Several residents say “Spark has been less than helpful.”

One resident said they’ve not had usable internet for almost a week.

“It seems to be a huge outage in North Canterbury. There are children in the area studying for NCEA, a friend is working from home coordinating vaccine appointments and others are trying to run businesses.”

Another resident said “we are all having major difficulty being able to speak to a real person to find out what is happening. Many people are working from home and having to use their mobile data to support their work.”

Waimakariri Mayor Dan Gordon wrote on his Facebook that he phoned Spark CEO Jolie Hodson and raised the concerns on residents’ behalf and also the fact that people had been advised to replace the modem.

Spark responds

A Spark spokeswoman told Chris Lynch, in a written statement, in late October there was a fault on the fibre network which resulted in some Spark customers in the Waimakariri and Rangiora areas experiencing a degraded internet service.

“We know how much our customers rely on internet connectivity, so we apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

She said “we have been working with Chorus to urgently fix the fault, however, there has been unforeseen delays due to the complexity of the fix – which requires traffic management approval to repair the fibre underneath the motorway. There have also been delays in sourcing the parts required.”

 “Because traffic management approval has not yet been granted, an interim solution has been identified to restore connectivity that will be implemented tonight at 11.00pm.”

“We are aware that some of our customers were incorrectly advised that the connectivity issue was due to their modems, and we apologise for this incorrect advice being provided. For any customers who purchased a new modem based on this advice, we ask you to get in touch with us directly so we can issue a refund.”

“We’d also like to remind our customers that if they have a Spark mobile or landline with us, they can activate ‘connection promise’ – which provides customers free mobile data or national calling. This can be activated through their MySpark account or by getting in touch with us directly. More information about connection promise can be found here: https://www.spark.co.nz/help/internet/manage/connection-promise/ .”