The village will come together at the Mullaley Community Hall next Wednesday to address the concerns of lengthy and continuous telecommunications outages.

Mullaley resident Geraldine McKay has called on federal, state and local government representatives to attend the meeting to “eyeball the community that is frustrated, bewildered and had a gutful”.

Mrs McKay also invited representatives of Telstra Country Wide, who said they were unable to attend.

With outages apparently plaguing the Mullaley exchange, Mrs McKay said she had concerns for the safety of the community if an emergency arose while phones were down.

“The fire brigade are unable to be contacted and gathered as a team. The SES are not contactable,” she said.

Mrs McKay said she was given conflicting reasons by different levels of Telstra staff as to the cause of the outages.

“The Telstra Country Wide area manager referred to the outages as an act of God, while technicians talk of faults in the triggering system for the back-up power to kick in during blackouts,” she said.

The outages were compounded by lengthy wait times to report and fix the breakdowns, according to Mrs McKay, who said there was a period of two weeks during which Mullaley had working phones for just six hours.

“We want everyone to bring the stories to the meeting in written form, so we can collate how it’s impacted the community and pass it on to Telstra. Third-world countries have better coverage than us,” she said.