Hi fellow Australians ,I moved into my current house 4 years ago and not long after this I got a letter saying my street will be getting the NBN and I should connect asap.
Well I did with Optus and I'm pretty sure that then they laid Fibre cable all the way to the house ,not like now hooking onto the old copper wire running up to the house from the junction box on the footpath.
I watched the entire installation from the new junction box on the foot path to the house. When I moved in here I was living alone and was using my mobile phone as a hotspot to my PC and it worked really well ,as well as or better than the ADSL2 service that I had previously.
The old ADSL service gave me no problems ,then to save money I used my mobile as a hotpot with no problems except for a much lower data allowance ,the along comes the Optus NBN - crap from day one!
After the guys left from fitting the boxes to the wall and a box with the modem ,off they went and I was left to hook it up but it did not work nor did the phone . So I rang Optus tech who could'nt handle my problem so irritated I asked to speak to tech from their service centre and got a young man who tried to sound savvy but was,nt.
After explaining to him the problem and him checking the line etc. he said it was ok ,to which I said it is not OK coz it does'nt bloody work my end . What he did not know is that I had a computer background and had installed many of modems and got around problems certain ways so I got him to tell me what readings he got testing my line and it all pointed to the need to flash the operating data chip on the modem from his end .
He denied this would fix it at first but had to admit I sounded like I knew a bit ,so then he checked out the model modem I was given by optus and it turns out they have not been flashed correctly and he proceeded to find the right code and and remotely flash my modem and now it worked.
BUT for the last four years we have been getting dropouts of internet and phone ,it is slower than what I had before so the NBN is a con .Mind you it is not as bad as some people in Australia are having but it sucks and is a giant backward step ! The phone has dropped out for days sometimes ,and only by checking to see if it is working do we know it is connected .Under the old system it never dropped out unless someone dug up the lines in the street ,the light for the phone on the modem is on but the phone is not connected !
The old system was powered by about 50 volts by telstra so the the phone was always active . Now old people and invalided people have to have a back up battery set installed .
Like I said we have been conned ,poorer countries than ours have better systems than us ,politicians here are incompetent and don't have proper hands on skills to deal with what was public utilities that worked once ,and a current crop of Liberal incompetents will only fuck it up more. Stepping down from soapbox now
