In June 2005 I finally got ADSL installed on one of my phone lines; contrary to the fears
expressed in previous outage reports, the line quality was more than ample. The Linksys
AG241 gateway that I got has a web page showing the
line status (see the DSL stats page for more details).
Watching this page proved to be useful: on 21 June, at about 10 pm, I discovered that the
upstream/downstream margins had deteriorated to only 6 dB upstream, which also caused the
upstream transmission rate to diminish from 256 kb/s to 160 kb/s. Here's a time line:
At about 22:00 I called up Telstra and spoke to Julie, who at first didn't want to know because
the ADSL service was with Internode, but I pointed
out that this was a line fault and that the line was from Telstra. She tested and confirmed
problems with the line and raised fault 116269434. Like everybody else, she seemed to have
difficulty with the concept that I had more than one line. She did call back and remind me that
I needed to raise separate faults for the other two lines, which are with “Call
Australia”, a company so low-budget that they don't even appear to have a web site. I
started monitoring line quality at regular intervals.
To my surprise, the lines didn't go down in the night, though there was a bit of the noise
in the phone lines. Called “Call Australia” and spoke to somebody who didn't
understand the issues, and who wanted me to disconnect the ADSL line so that he could test
the (unrelated) phone line. I wish I understood the problems that people have in
understanding that more than one phone line is involved. Spoke to Janice, his supervisor,
who also took 5 minutes to understand that three different lines were involved. She still
made me disconnect all lines except the one I was talking on, but then didn't do a test.
First thing this morning, of course the phone lines were still down. Called Telstra,
spoke to Becca, and was given a new repair date: 1900 tomorrow, Saturday 25 June. Put in
a complaint, number 1-48335559, and wrote yet another letter
to Alexander Downer;
I doubt he cares.
At 9:45, even the ADSL line died. Prepared to go into town and do something else, but to my
surprise it came back again at 11:10:
Obviously that was the time they needed to actually splice the cable. When it came back, the
margin values were back to normal, but it only took 15 minutes for the downstream margin to
drop by 5 dB. I wonder what caused that. Went and had a talk to the linesmen, but of course
they didn't know either.
