Coronavirus (COVID-19) Member Update

A message from the uConnected Team

As the world grapples with these unprecedented times, we wanted to take a moment to chat to our valued members about the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it may affect your uConnected service. In the current environment, communications platforms are immensely important, and we're working to ensure you stay connected with those who matter throughout this period.

Like yourselves, our team has shifted its office operations to support working remotely, all in the hope of continuing to deliver exceptional service throughout the crisis. Despite working remotely, our team is currently at full strength meaning all support requests are being addressed promptly and all internal systems are functioning correctly. Though there's certainly lots more calls taking place than usual! If anything changes we'll be sure to let you know right here, or on our Status page.

Member support

Now more than ever, we understand that due to unforeseen circumstances money to pay bills may not be in the right place at the right time. We're all enduring the toughest economic period in recent history – this is no fun at all. During this period, please contact us if you are experiencing financial hardship. This is part of our Financial Hardship Policy.

The technical stuff

Our data platforms are housed within Amazon's cloud, in their state-of-the-art Sydney data centres. This means you benefit from all of their fantastic support systems that are likely to keep most platforms stable throughout this crisis. While our voice systems are also hosted by Amazon, they're a little more complicated because they depend on thousands of connections between countless voice providers in order for calls to function. So when other providers have outages, say a provider up or downstream, we may not be able to forward a call to your handset because it could be unreachable. When possible, we use complex systems to detect third-party outages and attempt to route around their issues, often this helps but in a severe disruption (say when your carrier has a local or national outage) it's possible there may be no route to your handset. We just can't reach the device to send calls there.

Fortunately we have not experienced call issues in this crisis, so we're in good shape!

Government support

We are very lucky the Government is acting decisively in the national interest to support households and businesses and address the significant economic consequences of this pandemic. They've announced the $130 billion JobKeeper Payment to help keep Australians in jobs as we deal with the significant economic impact from the Coronavirus. The target is to help support individuals and households, support for businesses and the flow of credit. This is great news for all of us as we need all the support we can get at these pressing times. Get more insights about this helpful benefit right here.

The impact on Young Australians

In the past years, we're made aware that mental health issues continue to increase among young Australians. There's a very high level of loneliness reported among young people, even before this forced isolation we're into. That makes them more vulnerable to mental stress but we are able to help. One of the immediate solutions is to create a carefully crafted digital tool to help young people learn skills to develop and maintain meaningful relationships. We as a community can do our share. If you know anyone who needs help, share these to them:

1. Lifeline on 13 11 14
2. Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
3. MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978
4. Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467
5. Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36
6. Headspace on 1800 650 890

In closing

uConnected is an Australian small business delivering voice solutions to thousands of other small and big businesses, Government bodies, community service providers, schools, as well as our many valued home users. Please take extra care of yourself and each other, these are indeed tough times and we're all doing our very best to get by.

Take care,

Andrew, Mel, Micah and the rest of the uConnected team