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Telstra and butts

First off, once again they are having trouble finding their own. I think they’d still have trouble even with laser topology mapping and GPS.

You may remember a customer being told that they didn’t have ADSL, despite being able to point to the flashy box in the corner and the 150kB/s downloads as evidence that they were no longer dependent on dialup? Well, in a far-too-typical demonstration of quality control systems in action, Telstra made it so. When the technician’s visit on Monday to install the ADSL that they already had working was cancelled, the existing service was cancelled along with it.

Now, three days of headbutting walls later, the service is back on line again, and they’ve re-spread the entrails necessary to get a static-IP-enabled login back (by hand, Telstra refused to fix it for them automagically)... and it doesn’t work.

Second off, at another customer, Telstra have blessed an ADSL line which features ≅50dB of attenuation.

Needless to say, the continuous disconnections are not impressing anybody. The whole ADSL installation has been a circus from go to woah. The telephone people’s techs claimed that they’d heard nothing up until last Friday, but the customer placed the wiring order several weeks ago before ordering the ADSL connection (which took well over three weeks to arrive due to localised DSLAM starvatiuon), and then clarified it again when sorting out VoIP tie-line modules. Then they installed it the next workday without a filter, resulting for some odd reason in an SNR of 0dB. And now this. The 8 x 1Mb/s connection has been clamped to 1¾ x ½Mb and is now stable with an SNR of 20-24dB so finally OpenVPN can do its thing.

Oh, yes, and the ISP appears to have sent out an extra DSL modem at no charge. «shrug»

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