Moving back to Telstra ...

A long time ago, just before last Christmas in fact, I had an email from NBNco saying that we could have an upgrade to a pure fibre optic connection, rather than our current FTTC connection.

The only problem was that our current ISP wasn’t part of the upgrade scheme.

I emailed them and asked them if they were going to participate. Naturally, they said yes, and even emailed me a link to an online form to register my interest.

Several months went by, during which time our FTTC connection started having more frequent minor dropouts, culminating in a complete failure one Sunday morning.

I phoned our ISP, who did some tests, agreed the link was dead, and said that they would refer it to NBNco as it looked like infrastructure.

In the meantime our link started working, but nevertheless, a couple of days later we had three NBN trucks outside our house. They poked, they fiddled, they repatched our connection, and it did seem to work better, but we were still getting short duration dropouts.

Clearly our current ISP, iiNet, wasn’t coming to the party, so it was time to change ISPs.

Now, we live in a rural area. While there’s a whole lot of participating ISPs listed on the fibre upgrade website, most of the smaller ones don’t have much of a presence outside of the cities, and will understandably use subcontractors to do all their installation and configuration work.

I’m personally very conservative about infrastructure. Of the three players with a significant local presence, only Telstra has boots on the ground.

So, while it’s more expensive, Telstra seemed to be the logical choice.

So, I contacted them.

You would think it would be a simple thing to change ISPs.

Not with Telstra.

Despite the fact I already have a mobile phone account with them (the joys of rural life) I had to go through Passport, Drivers Licence, credit and income checks.

Then, they found they couldn’t actually order a fibre optic upgrade without me being an established customer, so the solution was that we change to Telstra, and I then request an upgrade, which apparently you can do once every billing cycle – or month as we normally call them.

All in all, it took over two hours to actually sign up with them

Telstra insisted on supplying me with their own modem rather than have me simply reconfigure our existing device.

Now we have been having some very wet weather recently, and I was understandably concerned that it would be delivered and left out in the weather.

They assured me that they would use StarTrack to deliver the unit, and that it would be taken to the post office if there was no one home to sign for it. That didn’t quite go as planned – only when I got a text message from Telstra saying the unit had been delivered did I discover that StarTrack had left it on the mat.

The other problem about changing ISPs is that we have FetchTV service through iiNet.

We wanted to keep our Fetch service, and I needed to find out if we could migrate it successfully.

No one at Telstra knew, and they only wanted to sell us some expensive monolithic FoxTel subscription.

iiNet clearly wasn’t going to tell us, and FetchTV’s own website was singularly unhelpful.

I eventually found a technical support email for Fetch, so I contacted them and asked the question. A very helpful person at Fetch asked me to email them the box serial number, which brought the bad news that it was locked to iiNet, and we would need a new box, which given that the unit is five years old is not a drama. We of course need to configure the box before we can get new subscriptions, and before then we need to get our Telstra link working.

As luck would have it was Judi’s birthday that week, and we’d arranged to go to Melbourne for a couple of nights  to see the  Paul Bonnard exhibition and have dinner out in the city, and she had to moderate a Zoom conference when we got back, so no way was I going to do any installation work until after that was done.

I had told Telstra this at the time of ordering, but of course I got a scad of no-reply text messages asking why I hadn’t plugged the Telstra modem in yet.

I decided that the best thing to do was ignore them unless I got an email or call I could reply to.

Telstra ignored all of this and remotely reconfigured our existing modem, which was not a problem, it meant we had working internet when we came home.

Disconnecting the old modem and plugging in our new Telstra modem took all of five minutes – in fact the modem took longer to boot than it took to swap over.

It was then a case of swapping out our old locked to iiNet fetch box. Again the physical swap took less than five minutes followed  by twenty minutes sat on the lounge room floor with a laptop registering with Fetch and getting various magic activation codes.

In fact the longest part of the exercise was waiting for the box to run various firmware and software upgrades.

We then left things for twenty four hours to make sure that our connection was stable (it was) and then called the number Telstra had given me to call to request an FTTP upgrade.

It was a Saturday, and the call centre that dealt with FTTP upgrades was closed.

However, there’s always an alternative route with Telstra – I used the technical support chat service they provide to ask if they could process an upgrade request.

They could, and after twenty minutes or so of confirming details and agreeing that Telstra could seize and resell various body parts if we did not follow through we had a fibre upgrade request.

In fact, I need to compliment Telstra on their officiousness and thoroughness, they checked about home alarms, medical equipment monitors, if we had a panic alarm, warned us that things might be disconnected and not work during the upgrade process. They even asked if we needed (for a price) a technician to help swap cables. Totally unnecessary, but I can imagine various elderly relatives who might benefit from a service like that.

At the end of it I had a job reference number and we were set.

Apparently, someone from Telstra will call me later in the week to get things scheduled, they say it will take six to eight weeks, but living in a rural area I know that the timescales can be different from those stated, and if they have a crew in the area they might piggy back our job onto one they scheduled earlier.

Here’s hoping …