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Basslink still unsure where cable fault is, facing 'phenomenal' repair costs

Tuesday, 15 Mar 2016 11:02:06

Basslink is paying at least $100,000 every day its repair ship is on the job. (Supplied: Basslink)

Repair crews are still unsure where the fault in Tasmania's vital undersea cable is days after cutting it, Basslink chief executive Malcolm Eccles says.

Key points:

  • Crews don't know exactly where fault is on 200km stretch of cable
  • Repairs costing at least $100,000 per day
  • Basslink reconsidering telecommunications role

A fault in the cable has plunged Tasmania into an energy crisis compounded by record low rainfall which has left the stat's hydro dams critically low.

The Basslink cable was bringing about 40 per cent of Tasmania's power to the state but a fault has left it out of action since December.

About 9:15pm on Friday, Basslink severed the cable as it began repairs. It is not expected to be fully fixed until May.

The cut is 89 kilometres from the Tasmanian mainland.

Mr Eccles told 936 ABC Hobart the fault was somewhere between the cut and Victoria.

"We don't know until we actually start to do the next phase of testing," he said.

"What we need to do is we obviously need the weather window to be able to lift the cable to put it on the deck of the vessel and then we have to carry out a number of tests.

The Basslink cable being cut as repairs begin. Photo: Divers cut the Basslink cable at 9:15pm on Friday as repairs began on the broken interconnector. (Supplied: Basslink)

"And only then after we've done those tests will we know if we're 200 metres, 500 metres, a kilometre [from where the cable was cut]."

Mr Eccles said he was confident there would not be a long stretch of cable that needed to be replaced.

He said the vessel being used in the repair job was very expensive.

"If you've got a submarine cable which is 300 kilometres and you need to fix it it's $100,000 a day for a vessel, minimum," he said.

"The repair costs are phenomenal."

He said the estimated completion date for the repairs was still some time in May.

Basslink reconsidering telecommunications role

Basslink also carries fibre optic cable as well as its power infrastructure.

It is used by a number of non-Telstra affiliated internet service providers (ISPs), but that service stopped when the cable was cut.

That left about one third of Tasmania's internet users with very slow or "unusable" internet speeds.

External Link: iinet tells custmes services should be partly restores by Thursday

Telstra operates its own undersea cables which it said had "more than enough" capacity to provide affected ISPs the bandwidth they need.

But Basslink said the terms offered by Tesltra were "completely uncommercial" leaving the ISPs to negotiate the service separately.

The degraded service prompted an angry response from customers who felt they were not warned about the outage.

One affected company, iinet, posted an update on its Facebook pages promising speeds would be increased by Thursday.

But Tasmania's ICT minister said there was no reason for the delay.

"Its my advice that it in fact should be in place today and I think it's important that that occurred," he said.

The company may reconsider carrying fibre optics on the cable once it's up and running again.

Mr Eccles said his company's primary business was power and it may reconsider its telecommunications role in the future.

"We've always said it's got to be a viable business for us, the moment it becomes unviable, we're operating as a business so if we suddenly have a business that's actually not viable then it would be unfair to our shareholders to actually continue."

That could also mean a price increase for customers.

"We are requesting a fair price for the use of our asset," Mr Eccles said.

"Submarine cable infrastructure is several times more expensive than land based infrastructure

"I'm really over listening to people talking about a subsea fibre optic like it's a mainland fibre optic, the cost of repair is absolutely enormous."

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