We were fortunate enough to find a rental property to move into that’s in one of the few areas that actually have fibre to the premises. The house we left had a perfectly good ADSL line and we put it to good use. We had a bit of trouble after we moved into the NBN zone though.
Firstly, because the area was flagged as NBN ready, we couldn’t simply port our ADSL account over, which was a problem because our house wasn’t actually connected to the NBN fibres that lived out under the footpath across the road from us.
Secondly, getting the house connected to the NBN fibres that lived out under the footpath across the road from us took a good 2 months of blunders from both NBN Co and Telstra, so in all that time we had no home phone and no Internet connection whatsoever.
We were originally hoping to go with Optus because they had a better value plan that we liked. So after contacting them, they organised a date for the NBN Co contractors to come out and connect us up. Problem was, there were no contractors available for at least two weeks. So we had to wait, with no phone or Internet, even though there was a fully functioning old phone jack on the wall that produced a dial tone, but which was connected to the old copper network, so we weren’t allowed to utilise it.
A couple of days before the big day we got a message from NBN Co that there was a shortfall and a team would need to investigate, which would again take a couple of weeks before anyone could come out to look at it again. Optus told us that they couldn’t do anything to help us without the house being connected and said we’d have to contact Telstra because they’re the only telco that actually have technicians in our area, so we had to sign on with them for a more expensive 2 year contract in order to get the ball rolling so we could get the cables attached to our house.
After many weeks of delays and remade appointments we eventually got someone out who discovered that we weren’t connected to the optic fibres out in the street, which is what we kept telling them because there was no box attached to the house.
More delays and cancelled appointments happened and finally an NBN Co contractor arrived with vast quantities of fibre optic cables to connect us to the outside world… except, he didn’t have permission to climb the poles in our long driveway so he could attach the cables to them. Apparently they were owned by Telstra and NBN Co would need to make a formal request to use them… even though it was Telstra that had told them to do the work in the first place.
Anyways, we now have super fast NBN speeds at a higher than wanted cost, but it’s just as well because on Friday last week we awoke to a red light on the NBN box saying that the optic cable was no longer providing a signal and Optus probably would’ve just thrown their arms up in the air saying they didn’t know what to do again.
We contacted Telstra who organised for NBN Co to arrive the following Monday, so we had no home phone or Internet over the weekend. Monday morning an NBN Co contractor arrived and discovered that our personal optic fibre wire was somehow exposed from the pit it lives in across the road from our house and had been severed, probably from a lawnmower or whipper snipper. They suspect the last person doing maintenance in the pit forgot to clean up after himself and didn’t tuck our wire away when he put the lid back on the thing. So the NBN Co contractor that originally climbed our Telstra owned poles had to come around that afternoon, and climb them again, in gale force winds, to replace the entire cable which runs along 5 power poles in order to get from the pit across the road, to our house along our extended driveway.
All working again now. It was a journey to get it in the first place, and is quite vulnerable if the maintenance people don’t pay attention when they’re packing up, but we’re very happy with it for the most part.
