These photos document the latest in a long series of problems with
the phone line from my house to Telstra's Echunga
telephone exchange, 4.5 km away. On this occasion, we had a total failure of all five pairs
after heavy rainfall. It's not clear that this temporary fix was the place where things
failed, but it certainly looks like a good place to start, and under those circumstances you'd
expect somebody from Telstra to have got there before me.
The outage was still ongoing on Wednesday, 26
February, when I took the following photos. I had been told a number of reasons for the
delay:
There was no line fault, it must have been my telephone.
It was an exchange fault.
The line fault was physical damage caused by a third party, so Telstra was not liable to
perform the repair (this from Deena, the high-level complaint person).
The damage was related to an E71 repair (see the photos above). From a previous fault description I discover that this is a code
for ``cable fault, longer duration''. In other words, there is already work in progress on
this cable.
Due to contractual obligations, the line fault had to be repaired by a contractor.
The first contractor was not equipped to perform the repair, since the cable ran under a
road.
The photos below show the truth: all these claims are incorrect, with the possible exception
of the need for a contractor to perform the final repair. There is no road, and the people
performing this emergency repair (laying a slave cable) are Telstra employees, not contractors.
There is nothing out of the way in this repair: the cable is old (lead mantle, paper
insulation), and things like a tree root can rupture the mantle, after which water can get in
and cause the fault.
I spoke to the linesmen on site, and one of them told me that they were having great
difficulty sounding out the lines. They suspect other problems in the cable on both sides of
this damage.
