Its promotion, including an advertisement in Saturday’s The Standard, advised people to contact the call centre on 1800 171 355.

However, anyone ringing that number during the weekend would have discovered it operates only Monday to Friday 8am to 8pm.

“We’d like to connect you to a consultant for this inquiry, but unfortunately this centre is closed,” says a recorded message. 

Telstra had earlier indicated it would have crews of technicians ready to fix problems of crossed wires, line drop-outs and other problems.

Meanwhile Telstra customers are scheduled to receive letters today or tomorrow explaining that their bills have been cancelled from November 2 and the next bill won’t be until January 7.

“We are keen to keep customers in the loop,” Telstra’s regional manager Bill Mundy said on Friday.

“There will be another letter of explanation when the next round of bills arrive.”

About 65,000 landlines, 15,000 internet broadband services and more than 80 mobile phone towers were blacked out by a fire in the Warrnambool regional exchange on November 22.

Some mobile phone bills are still arriving via email with excess data charges from the time of the outage.

Telstra has said it will not charge its customers for exceeding their plan’s cap due to having to rely on mobile phones for voice and data during the communications disruption. Most mobile services were restored within four days, but it took until mid last week to get landlines and ADSL broadband links restored after a huge repair operation.

Non-Telstra customers have been advised to negotiate with their supplier for service problems, compensation and rebates.

Last week Wannon MP Dan Tehan urged all telcos to sort out the compensation issue.

A federal inquiry into the outage and its effects will start today with a hearing at Warrnambool’s Lighthouse Theatre from 10am to noon. It is open to all domestic and business phone and data users.

pcollins@fairfaxmedia.com.au