Dick Smith has been forced to close eight stores in Christchurch New Zealand after a 6.5 earthquake just before 1pm NZ time today. This was followed by constant aftershocks, some as powerful as magnitude 5.

Also affected by the earthquake is Harvey Norman who has one store in Queensland. Telstra who operate their struggling TelstraClear said that their network which uses a Telstra owned cable network was still up but like the recent Queensland Cyclone their network has been affected by a lack of power to key locations where operational gear is located.

Telecom New Zealand said that their Christchurch network was operable but there was significant network congestion and a lot of its network is running on battery power which has limited life.

Both Telecom NZ and TelstraClear advised fixed-line customers to use a plug-in analogue phone if they had one.

“These are currently running on back-up power. This means our voice services are still operating, except where there is damage to phone lines, individual premises or power is lost to premises,” spokesman David Courtney said.

About half of its 50,000 cable modem customers were without access to the internet.

At 3.00pm Australian Eastern Time, Vodafone said that their network was still running but 10 of its 150 towers in the region had been knocked out and another 43 were operating on battery back-up which will run out by midnight tonight.

A spokesperson for Dick Smith said that all of their Christchurch stores were now closed and that there had been no loss of life among employees.

All of the networks operating in Christchurch say that data networks which in a lot of cases are still operational will run out of power as battery back up fails.