NBN and Electricity planned outages

NBN have decided to put on a full days outage (again!) on a day that Sydneysiders are in lockdown and have been told to work from home. Unbelievable. After being forced to use this infrastructure we are now cut off at any time they see fit.

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Reports are also that Ausgrid seems determined to go ahead with maintenance that will see many in lockdown ‘powerless’ for up to 11 hours!

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But this LNP version of the NBN is as good as the full end-to-end fibre-optical system that Labor was going to build. (That’s what we were promised.)

Imagine how much worse it would have been if they had only been trying to save money.

:rofl:

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Well I sent a complaint to the ombudsman so lets hear what happens there. This is the notification they gave me

Hi there, the NBN Co is improving the network in your area from Tuesday, 29 June 7:00 am to Tuesday, 29 June 7:00 pm, so more customers like you can enjoy an even better internet connection. Keep streaming, scrolling and searching during this time by using mobile hotspot https://devicehelp.optus.com.au/. Track your network status anytime here: https://optus.com.au/network-status or contact us at https://optus.com.au/contact

What a smug dismissive text !

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It’s not a good outcome. Aside from questionable government regulation, is this more of the free enterprise future?

P.S.
Commiserations to those trying to make do trapped in with the family or work from home during any lockdown.

There may be some consolation for more regional and rural members of the community. We are obviously not the only ones subject to outages when most inconvenient. Planned or unplanned!

I keep promising to get rid of the second phone and mobile data service. I keep getting reminders it is too often essential.

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My view with the increase and reliance on technology is to expect more disruptions. So, try and have a plan B for when the power failures occur. Most people are glued to their devices, and have serious problems in coping without them for any period of time. It’s a huge issue in society, that we’re all part of, to some extent, also being fuelled by Government and Business forcing people to adopt this stuff. A bit like trying to live without a credut card. Social engineering, I believe.

How are we forced to be glued to our devices?

For example trying to contact a business that does not have a phone number, or having constant battles with providers to send paper invoices to my house.

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Not forced but very heavily encouraged to do so. Questions like “what’s your best phone number” and then expecting it to be a mobile. Another is QR codes eg for The Virus. Almost obligated that your login involves an email address and the fact that even a login is almost a requirement to access a lot of services eg MyGov.

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I can’t see how either of those examples are social engineering. If a genuine business is so foolish to not have a phone number how would they do business? Even if it was so vote with your feet and deal with others. We will not get service from business unless we demand it.

Trying to eliminate paper invoices is a growing trend, the motive is money nothing more. If you count that as social engineering (which I don’t) it has been going on for millennia and didn’t need to the digital era to bring it on.

At long last after the IT industry started spruiking about the paperless office it is starting to happen but the motive is just money whether private or public. I suppose there was a time when people resisted having to get a telephone but it became standard in time. The same will happen to digital communications.

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Groan! Tell me about it! A great example of a reasonably good idea badly implemented. It is as if they took the 19th century quill pen bureaucratic mindset and automated it - slowly.

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Now replication at a State level in Qld “QGov” and almost mandatory to have if you deal with any State agency. Have other States started?

This is another Topic sorry but shows how online presence has become virtually a necessity of our lives.

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Not exactly glued to, but in possession of.

I have a number of recent transactions/registrations that mandated a mobile number. One time codes via SMS seem all in vogue these days. Ring them and their first response is what code did we just send you? The alternative Q&A is nothing less than irritating and time wasting.
:expressionless:

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I think we are straying from the point. My point was that because we were all forced to move to the NBN which is a monopoly, you would think that especially during a lockdown when we were told that we should not go to work and work from home, the NBN throws a planned outage If there has to be a maintenance to a road or the railway, they do it in off-periods. But the NBN they had on a work day from 7am to 7 pm. That’s my point. The NBN should be considered critical infrastructure not just some nice service to help you watch movies.

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I agree with you @marie.belcredi about planned outages.
If a lockdown occurs then ALL maintenance that could effect key utilities to people’s homes should be postponed.

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Your point in your first post was well taken. Sometimes discussions raise issues that are off topic but they normally return to somewhere near being on point.

The parts after your original post had some relevance but they have been linked into a more appropriate topic. They should no longer spread further in this one.

If you are ever concerned about relevance please Flag the part you are concerned with and Moderation as needed will take place. Thank you for your contribution to this discussion as it helps by providing first hand experience of the difficulties.

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I agree in principle. Perhaps the problem is that there is no agreement about what is the off-period. For those who work through the system the essential time might be 8am to 6pm. For those doing homework is could be 4pm to 10 pm, watching streaming movies 7pm to 1am. If the maintenance cannot be done between midnight and dawn somebody will be unhappy, well dedicated international gamers would be unhappy even then.

These graphs are a year old and I believe with COVID useage has continued to grow but I doubt it was between midnight and 8am, so picking the off-period is no easier.

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Yes there will always be someone using the internet as there is always someone using the road . My comment, if we can go back to it, is making the outages when there are the least number of users impacted for high priority usage. I dint regards streaming internet at midnight as a high priority usage. Sorry!

Some people have international obligations such as trading on international markets or working for a multinational company and attending video conferences. Global family catch ups also happen at sometimes odd hours on one side or the other, although usually with less urgency than work related needs. What hours constitute the ‘off period’ can be different for different users having different requirements.

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