Had a storm blow through and had a short power outage. The NBN cable modem struggled to reconnect but after 25 min voila, internet service back up. A while later discovered no VOIP. Rang ABB who confirmed I was not on their network!!! Seems the NBN HFC can get its logical wires crossed. Handy to have my fully charged mobile to keep up with events. Looks fixed in only an hour but who would have known it was broken? Except by dumb luck… if not for a gent having trouble on my mobile and then trying the VOIP landline that was not working, so rang back on the mobile, who knows how long this could have gone on.
I think it’s what our government calls progress.
5 Likes
It would seem the NBN when it isn’t working might actually be helping us and freeing up more time to be productive.
A simple tip brought to us by the NBN. Don’t connect and we will reward you with 3+hours of free time every week! 
Who says the NBN is no laughing matter!
7 Likes
/start rant
Another 1 minute power failure at 07:42PM last night. After watching the cable modem trying to (re)connect and knowing how it goes, all tests failed, Aussie raises a fault at 08:07PM. Seems every fault raised requires the RSP to also book a technician to attend no matter how relevant it might be to an obvious NBN fail. Got the booking for 2 days hence 
28/12/2019 08:47pm AEDT - nbn advises of a network incident caused by a local power outage that is impacting some HFC end users in the Montmorency, VIC area. Network Engineers are monitoring the situation and once the power is restored will test alarms and perform health checks on the network to confirm stability. Following this, nbn will then close this ticket. nbn recommends end users perform a reset of their modem/CPE once the power is restored to their area.
Resolved and notified at 12:20AM.
What is a mere 4.5 hours downtime because of a common power failure in the area? The amateur hours reinforce nothing is too good for us. 
Maybe we need to send the NBN some data sheets on UPS and battery backups; they seem oblivious how to do.
Nothing like having the fully charged mobile to be able to report. 
/end rant
6 Likes
… so many unsolved crimes, and here is all this genius wasting away running the NBN …
Like so many things these days, we are at the mercy of (potentially) marvellous technology with muppets at the controls.
The surprising thing here is their relatively quick (less than a week) correlation of events to diagnose a single failure rather than having a posse of ‘techs’ visit dozens of premises before they stumbled across a common root cause …
6 Likes
Almost all the problems faced in the MTM NBN would have been avoided as has been posted many times. To place backup batteries and UPS for HFC, FTTN and similar tech by the NBN Co to address these power outage issues would add further Billions of dollars to the cost. I see the responsibility for both the home connection and infrastructure and the commercial side are NBN Co’s when it comes to providing power when outages occur similar to how the copper lines power was maintained. They/d probably consider it if real pressure was mounted to replace it all with FTTP as they wouldn’t like to be shown up in front of Labor.
What we have been given and we are seemingly accepting is that our connections are all our responsibility even though we pay someone else to provide and maintain the service. No compensation is given to the users who because of these failures lose their connections particularly in cases of emergencies, but any disconnect outside of a users control should be compensated regardless. Add that compensation cost to the costing and the MTM NBN would be vastly more costly than a mostly FTTP nbn™. We have been deluded and short changed in regard to this but nothing has changed so we will and have been left holding the can.
8 Likes
[Mode: “sarcasm”]
We have a taskforce! That’ll fix it.
[/Mode]
https://www.pmc.gov.au/domestic-policy/digital-technology-taskforce
1 Like
Recommendation 1: get rid of laws enforcing metadata collection and requiring companies to build back doors into their own products.
Recommendation 2: step back and let someone who has a clue take ownership.
2 Likes
Another storm, another power fail (42C out, 45 minutes restoration) - same old rubbish in our pocket of Eltham.
Hours later, from the email trail from AussieBB.
01/02/2020 04:50am AEDT - nbn advises of a network incident caused by a local power outage that is impacting some HFC end users in the Eltham VIC. Network Engineers are monitoring the situation and once the power is restored, will test alarms and perform health checks on the network to confirm stability. Following this activity, nbn will then close this ticket. nbn recommends end users perform a reset of their modem/CPE once the power is restored to their area.
31/01/2020 10:31pm AEDT - nbn is currently investigating a network outage impacting the HFC network in Eltham VIC. Updates will be provided as more information becomes available.
Only 6 + hours to recover from an all but routine power failure. Impressive!
4 Likes
Just remember to always be at home when the NBN goes down or there is a local power outage.
So much for the Dis-“connected” home and IOT future. 
And how many different ways can connected devices refuse to reconnect to the cloud after a network connection loss?
3 Likes
I apparently dodged the bullet. The fault seems to not have affected me since the original notice was an overnighter and my NBN service has been up since 20 minutes after my power was restored.
But some other ‘lucky’ NBN customers? Not such a ‘good’ experience. In this morning’s emails the fault is apparently not going to be fixed until
02/02/2020 04:15am AEDT - The commercial power supplier has provided a revised ETR of 10AM.
NBN is obviously designed and built to high standards taking into account that it is nothing beyond an unnecessary frivolity and 36 hours down because of a local power issue, priceless. They point to ‘not us’ for their failures. Is it reasonable for a network UPS to be able to ride hours, and the operator have generators? Or not because they consider if they have no power neither do their customers, so no worries because ‘everything’ is down, NBN as well as their users?
Those fully charged mobiles, pure gold, but if you use the net make sure you have an adequate data plan.
edit: without those mobiles and data plans these ‘timely and informative’ emails would never be seen, but Godot might come in the meanwhile.
edit2: 02/02/2020 12:10 in the afternoon - just received notice the power related problem starting about 10:31PM on 31/01/2020 has been resolved and if my NBN connection is still not working to reset the modem. I am gobsmacked! Just wow! (messages came by email and AussieBB app)
3 Likes
TPG is raising its head about their RSP experience with NBN HFC.
I recently received the following re my own HFC connection for ‘planned maintenance’
Start date and time: Tue 10th March 2020 07:00 AEDT
End date and time: Mon 16th March 2020 18:00 AEDT
Window: 155.0 hours
You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance:
- 180 min
- 180 min
- 180 min
- 180 min
- 180 min
Any further comment on this or the minds (?) who wrought this NBN on us would be a violation of family friendly speech. My fully charged mobile is at the ready, complete with a data plan.
6 Likes
I’m on HFC NBN, and have received about a dozen messages of that type since we connected. Only a couple have caused an interruption during times when I’ve wanted to be online. One resulted in an outage outside of their predicted window.
4 Likes
I have had more than a dozen and have been put offline for periods, although the longest was about 30 minutes not 180. They throw their worst case scenario at us seemingly without any intelligent planning against the works.
3 Likes
Got another regular notice from ABB this arvo. Seems their unnamed ‘upstream provider’ does not have enough capacity to service all the VOIP calls since people have been working from home, so VOIP calls, to be kind, are periodically unreliable or failing to connect at all.
My fully charged mobile remains at the ready.
2 Likes
This is what has been posted on the Telstra website…
National call network congestion - As more people work from home and schools close, we are seeing demand on our network increase daily and this will continue. Overall mobile call volumes on certain routes and geographies are up by more than 50%. Specific numbers to Government call centres are experiencing three times the call volumes compared to last week, and over twenty times the normal call volume. As a result we’re seeing congestion impacting a small proportion, 3-4%, of calls on our mobile network, with most of the congestion being driven by the high number of calls to Government 13 and 1800 numbers. There is no impact on data as yet.
2 Likes
We shall see. The NBN could still rear its head as an election issue, in a tangential way.
4 Likes
Again the predictions of not fit for the modern data needs of the populace, MTM NBN issues raise their vast ugly heads. World leading, perhaps if they consider world leading in reaching for “under performance”, fit for purpose…well that’s obviously not correct at all. Efficient, effective, and so on of the superlatives the Govt keep lauding on the debacle we call the NBN are all manifestly untrue. Work from home? I would think this would only be workable for those on fibre, or solid >50 Mbps FTTN/FTTC connections (very few are solid), maybe HFC (not counting the outage issues because if you did count them it wouldn’t be).
FW, Sat are just abysmal, pricing is far too high for the quality of service most get, reliability is bad, all in all a failure to launch.
3 Likes
More fun w/VOIP. I have HFC. NBN did some increasingly common ‘maintenance’ over night. Few calendars can keep track of all the possible interruptions and ‘work’ so it gets easy to loose track. Later in the day I get a call on the mobile whinging my landline has been engaged for hours.
Quickly confirmed the VOIP did not re-register after the ‘maintenance’. I may have learned my router has a feature that once the VOIP handshake breaks only a reboot will fix it, or it was fooled by whatever NBN was doing and thought it was connected I sent off a tech request to D-Link to please explain since this has happened before.
I posted it before but became complacent. Always check the VOIP-up light after NBN maintenance.
3 Likes
My internet is fine. I don’t know if there’s a connection but my cordless phone connection has been out since March 17.
