PHONE landlines to some police stations in the south-west have been subject to technical issues as Telstra admitted there was a system problem they needed to fix.

The Spectator tried multiple times to call Hamilton, Penshurst, Balmoral and Cavendish police stations on their landline number on Monday morning, only to be either cut off immediately, or get through but have the messaging system stop midway through a sentence, with the call going silent.

Coleraine Police Station appeared to be unaffected.

A Telstra spokesperson said the issue was something they were aware of and they had tried to do “a software fix” to address it, but had realised they still had work to do.

“It’s only when you call the landline,” he said.

“It doesn’t impact 131444 numbers or 000 calls.

“It’s only in a very specific set of circumstances when you’re trying to dial the number directly.”

Cavendish leading senior constable, Paul McLean said he had been made aware that Hamilton and the area was having some issues, but wasn’t too concerned for his own beat, as single-member stations in small country towns tended to work a bit differently.

“People rarely use the landline, they use the mobile to contact me,” he said.

He said other police stations were aware of statewide problems and had been told it was being “sorted out”.

Telstra said the intermittent nature of the fault was the worst kind of problem, as their own technicians were calling the numbers from other locations and the numbers worked fine.

“They rang all those stations and got through, which makes no sense at all,” the spokesperson said.

What made it hard was the technicians originally thought it was a re-occurrence of a problem they had a few weeks ago or related to a power issue early on Monday morning, but the gremlin was refusing to be revealed so easily.

At time of print the fault was still ongoing.

The community were advised to use 131 444 for police assistance when not an emergency and 000 for emergencies.

Ldg Sen Const McLean said he was glad it wasn’t a fault affecting the emergency number.

“If it was that, there’d be someone working on that straight away,” he said.

The mobile upgrades Telstra have been recently doing on the network in Hamilton were also unrelated to the problem.