This morning at 9:38 we went off the net again! I was having breakfast and didn't find out until about 10:15. Called up Aussie Broadband support and was just describing the problem when the connection came back again. Only 40 minutes outage.
But that was premature. It failed again after 8 minutes, and stayed down. Called Aussie again and got confirmation that others had had the same problem. But they still needed to treat it as an isolated fault, because the National Broadband Network hadn't reported any failure. Why not? The NTD was showing normal status, so it makes sense to guess that the problem was in the link between Dereel and Ballarat.
Called up the NBN on 1800 687 626 and found a voice menu option Press 1 if your phone service was disconnected in error . Well, I suppose this is an error, so pressed that and got connected to Sean after 2:15 minutes. He listened carefully and took down a complaint, less carefully: I had to correct him several times. The way I see it, there are multiple issues:
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The NBN should perform enough network monitoring to notice when problems of this magnitude occur. As I see it, they only become aware of faults when a customer reports them.
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Customer reporting is further complicated by the rigmarole that Every Single Customer must complete, including crawling on the floor with a mirror to look at the LEDs next to the RJ45 jacks, which point down at the floor. It takes at least 15 minutes to complete it, including a reboot of the NTD. And if only one customer reportsperhaps because of the time of dayit might still not get the attention it deserves.
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Customers should get feedback on why the outage occurred.
I asked Sean what the availability goals for the NBN were. He didn't understand the question, and I had to explain it to him. Finally he went searching and came up with a figure: 99.9% availability averaged over a year.
That's terrible! It's nearly 9 hours a year. It means that what I've experienced so far (1 hour in June, 5 hours in July, and at least an hour today), is roughly all I can expect. And that's for a new, modern replacement for Telstra's aging copper infrastructure, which here in Dereel hasn't gone down at all in the 7 years I have been here. How can they claim to offer improved infrastructure with that level of service?
In any case, it looks as if they'll look into it. They'll assign a case manager and a specialist to it, and they gave me the reference number 511066-91183999 (hopefully the size of the number isn't an indication of the number of complaints they're receiving).
And at the end: Please hold on and answer a short three question survey . Did that. Beep, beep, beep. It's not the first time I've had that, either.
And how long was the outage? No idea. After 2 hours, 20 minutes I still had no connection, and then I discovered that after shooting down the DHCP client, I had forgotten to restart it Started it again and got an immediate connection. Not all problems are NBN's fault.
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