Just before Christmas and after numerous calls to Telstra to our holiday house on the Mornington Peninsula to try to fix a very erratic ADSL service, we were told that NBN was finally available, and that if we connected our very flaky internet should be fixed. And I feel relieved to now have that device as a backup for any future outages, which I have no doubt will arise on our very flakey NBN HFC service. This has allowed my business to continue functioning and other members of the family to carry out Skype calls for business, get homework done and (very importantly) stream content at night! So Telstra agreed to allowing me to purchase a 4G Wi-Fi modem from a Telstra shop, and to re-imburse me for the cost of this device and its data. In my own case, the addition of mobile data to my iPhone's SIM was not sufficient to meet the needs of this household - especially when I run a business from home. This assumes you have a mobile phone plan with the same Telco. (If you are not sure how to do this, check this handy hint from iTandCoffee: Lend your mobile internet to your Wi-Fi only device - using your Personal Hotspot.) If you are suffering an extended internet outage, it is worth asking your Telco to provide you with additional mobile data for your mobile phone, so that you can utilise the 'personal hotspot' or 'tethering' capability of these devices, whereby your mobile device provides a wi-fi network that other devices can join - and those other devices then use the mobile data associated with the phone. Can we trust the Outages information provided by NBN and Telco's? Unfortunately, if it is not a complete outage - which in our case was the situation, with the internet coming and going but not being usable - then the line test will not necessarily fail. It really helped to be able to counter this with information about other impacted addresses, and to then force them to look into the problem further and log a fault with NBN. In the early stages of our own extended outage at this address, we found that the different Telcos were telling callers from this street that there was no outage, on the basis that NBN had not recorded a fault and their 'line test' did not indicate an issue. It is also worth checking with your neighbours to find out who else is 'off the air' - preferably before you call your Telco to report the outage. If there is no outage registered (as has been the case during our own extended outage), it is worth contacting your Telco to report the outage. For Optus, go to For other providers, just Google 'outages provider-name' to find the applicable web page. If this doesn't help, it is then worth checking the outages web page to see if there is currently an outage at your address. Wait for the upstream and downstream lights to start flashing, then plug in the white box. Wait about 10 seconds, and then power on the NBN black box. The first thing to try when you are suffering internet issues is to switch off both the black box and the white box (or equivalent) by unplugging them. There is also the mis-conception that the Wi-Fi symbol on computer and mobile devices provides an indication of there being an internet connection. What I have found when talking to people about their own internet outages and Wi-fi issues is that, quite often, there is a lack of understanding of what the lights on their router and NBN modem tell them about the their current service status. Luckily, our phone diverts to voicemail when there is an NBN outage - so clients can still leave messages if they call our 1300 number. Internet seems to finally be be back (touch wood) today, Thurs 6th Feb, but the phone is still not working. This is following on from ongoing outages and dropouts for our NBN HFC service, which have persisted since the rollout of NBN started. Here at iTandCoffee, we have had a phone and internet outage lasting 5 days. So many weeks at iTandCoffee have a common theme, and theme for the past fortnight or so has been Wi-Fi issues and internet outages, at both iTandCoffee and for other clients.
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