One reason why we need the NBN…

About three weeks ago, after a bout of heavy raining, our internet connection started playing up. We have an ADSL2+ service delivered by iiNet and it has been excellent for the past 13 months. However their handling of the problems we’ve been having has been almost exactly the opposite.

• ADSL sync started dropping out; line would stay up for between five minutes and two hours though it was seemingly random and always different. It might drop out three times in a row with ten minutes in between and then stay up for two hours. Only to drop out again every fifteen minutes twice in a row, etc. Most of the time it would reconnect at sane speeds, above 5Mbit, but you’d also often get less than 1.5Mbit and essentially the internet was unusable. Typically we sync. at around 11-13Mbit, so even a 5Mbit line speed was pretty shitty.
• During the first week it was a call every other day to iiNet for them to get me to change some random settings on our modem or to try another modem. After three different modems and three different line filters, we decide the problem definitely isn’t on our end.
• It took about a week after our first complaint for iiNet to decide to send someone out. This they did extremely poorly. Our service is under the original owners name (my housemates mother) who is currently living overseas. So the iiNet call centre staff would ask us the best contact point and I would give them my brothers’ name and phone number. Of course, the guy doing the callout never got this information for whatever reason, so our first visit was delayed due to them calling the wrong number and being unable to organise a time to visit – or anything at all – on account of that numbers’ owner being overseas.
• The first guy to visit does some basic testing on the line. His equipment looks like it is straight from a 1980s science-fiction show. Basically all he did was test the voltage, amperage and such on the line, which was normal. He then poked around out the front of the premises where the line comes in from the street. I had never seen this before so was rather annoyed to learn that our cable entry point was actually a twist-tied cable join covered in electrical tape. Still, this line had been fine for ages so I guess that was “good enough”. The guy visiting just cut back the cable to remove any oxidization on the exposed copper and then re-twisted and re-taped it, declaring “problem solved” and the issue fixed.
• This didn’t fix the problem. We still had the same random dropouts and line speed issue. Again iiNet organised a tech to come out, this time a proper Telstra technician. Apparently he was to make changes at the exchange and investigate at our house. Again he was given the wrong number by iiNet and again his visit was delayed by this.
• So up to now about two and a half weeks have passed with no resolution of the problem. This entire time we had been unable to do much of anything online on account of these dropouts and random line speeds.
• Telstra guy shows up and does his work, we are told the problem will be fixed by close of business that day, 7PM. So we wait until 7PM and tentatively fire up all our data-hungry games, video-on-demand etc, and are surprised that we’ve managed to stay online for about five hours or so. Cool.
• Until the day afterwards. Another Telstra technician (or maybe the same one), unbeknown to myself or my brother, shows up. He is let in by family staying temporarily with us and does further work on the line. This time however, he leaves behind a completely non-functioning line. When I arrive at home late in the afternoon to discover that not only do we not have ADSL line synchronisation, but in fact we do not have a dial tone or any kind of service at all, I am completely dumbfounded. They had literally just undone everything we’d been waiting for for the last three weeks. As I write this, the next day, our service is still offline.

What the fuck? I work in this industry. How can anyone fuck up so badly and still be a dominant market force? Oh sorry I forgot, it’s Telstra. I called iiNet to lodge this latest fault – the support guy sounded genuinely surprised – and at the same time had a whinge at them about their poor handling of this whole fiasco. The support tech. was pretty helpful and after I had my little rant to him he apologised to me. I explained to him that I meant no offense, but his apology meant nothing to me as it was obviously not his personal responsibility. I preempted what I thought would be typical blame-game responses by reinforcing the concept of the service contract existing between myself and iiNet, and while yes Telstra had fucked up on this occasion and not iiNet, it was iiNet who I was paying for a service and whatever dealings they had with Telstra behind the scenes were not my concern. I asked if I could be given a one month credit and he agreed to put me through to the billing department for that.

The guy in billing was also quite helpful but at first he told me his supervisor would only give us a three week credit because that was the length of the fault time. I responded by saying to him that at this very moment, our service was still not fixed, so should I wait for it to still not be fixed in a weeks’ time and call back then? He said that he hadn’t thought of it like that and then asked his supervisor again, and I was given a one month credit.

At this point in time, if our line is fixed today and the credit goes through without problems I will be once again happy-with-but-cautious-of-recommending iiNet to anyone else. If the service isn’t fixed today, without some plausible excuse as to why, I will have to seriously reconsider my subscription to iiNet.

To pull this all back to the title of this post, the way the NBN works would mean that more companies than Telstra alone could have been called in to investigate the fault initially, thereby reducing our chance of extended downtime.