Telstra will do just about anything to avoid having to come to your house to fix your connection crisis. You may know in your heart of hearts, through bitter personal experience, that the problem lies with the ISP and not your humble home setup, but each new contact with Telstra is a new chapter in the continuing story of your spotty internet access.
Been down this road before? No matter – it’s a whole new journey.
First you’ll need to undergo some healthy self-diagnoses by un-pugging and re-plugging your modem and perhaps a few other things under the tutelage of your new friend, the weary but friendly techie on the other end of the phone who’s been through this drill a few thousand times but seems to have limitless patience for your kind.
They like you so much that it immediately gets personal. You can call them back directly to follow up with anything – or at least you can call the number they text through and they’ll get right back on the case, unless of course they’re not there or are busy with someone else. In that case, you’ll have to forge ties with a new personal helper.
According to the Telstra techie, your internet speeds are just fine. They even direct you to some kind of official website to prove it. After a number of false starts, under the soothing guidance of the Telstra techie, you seem to find the right site. It looks like your speeds are through the roof!
But the optimistic graphs and squiggles indicating lightening-fast service at your premises look fishy to you.
What? The troubleshooting didn’t work? The Telstra rep suggests there’s something wrong on your end, not theirs. Is your modem an authorised Telstra modem? No? Hmmm. Let’s try another round of plugging and unplugging.
It’s weird that it’s your fault because you just hired one of those roving technician services to show up at your house and make sure all your home gear in is tiptop shape. You’ve used these people before and they’re good – at least you think they are. They even sold you a new modem and surge protector this time around.
And they left saying, ‘if it still doesn’t work or you have any more issues, it’s on Telstra’s end, not yours’.
The real mystery is how all this trouble came about in the first place. Your internet connection was working wonderfully, so wonderfully in fact that you were afraid to so much as touch or even breathe on your desktop for fear of breaking the magic spell. Your other devices worked intermittently depending on your location in the house.
Then the glorious run of reliable, sort of fast connectedness came to a sudden end – as mysteriously as it had begun.
Maybe you’re not alone. In the first half of the year, Telstra experienced seven major outages, and the free data they threw in to make amends only went so far.
Your new Telstra friend finally succumbs after about a half hour on the phone and agrees to send a Telstra van to your premises. You called in mid September – does late January next year work for you? Oh, and there will be a callout fee, on top of the hefty price premium you’re paying Telstra in the first place.