Australia’s two largest telecommunications companies have both reported service outages in the aftermath of Cyclone Yasi.

Telstra said it is seeing scattered customer impact from Cairns to Townsville to landline and broadband services.

“Early indications suggest that around 15,000 landline phones are currently not operating and over 60 mobile towers are without service on the network. Despite this, our mobile network is operating normally in these areas, as many impacted sites have overlapping coverage.”

In addition to network outages, Telstra said it expects individual service faults to be much higher across the region as people return home and to their businesses.

“Power outages across the region will have an impact on our network over coming days. We can advise that we have around 450 network sites that are currently without power. They are operating on back-up power at this stage. Our crews will work hard to keep these sites powered, but there will be some sites we cannot access due to safety reasons like damaged power lines and debris blocking access.”

Telstra said it is anticipating that many network sites will be damaged and will be assessing the worst hit priority sites in consultation with emergency service crews so it can commence repairs.

Meanwhile, Optus said there has been localised impact to the Optus mobile and fixed network in the cyclone affected areas of Queensland as of 10.30am today.

The Optus Open mobile network is currently operational in Cairns, Townsville and other regional centres along the coast. The Optus Open mobile network has 52 base stations impacted currently and a number of base stations are running on back up batteries due to loss of power.

The Optus Reef Network which provides transmission for voice and data services between Brisbane and Cairns is currently operational on back up batteries. Optus’ alternative redundancy transmission route to the area is unaffected.

Optus is working with Emergency Service organisations and Ergon Energy to arrange access to restricted areas in order to connect generators to recharge batteries and provide continuity of service to mobile infrastructure.

The company said its network engineers are assessing any further impact to the Optus network along the coastline.