The Trials and Tribulations of Internet Access.

The Trials and Tribulations of Internet Access.

or; Internet, Internet, Lama Sabachthani?

Having moved house not that long ago, I signed up for the assortment of utilities, including internet access.  Now the standard internet connection in this part of the world is ADSL2+: it's the type of connection I had before, and it's what I expected to continue with.  In fact, before moving I just told my ISP to move my service to my new address.  A standard procedure, in fact, for them and most other ISPs.

Alas, it turned out that my new location was, shall we say, not quite as urbanified as that of my previous residence, despite being geographically closer to the heart of the city.  The ISP could, however, offer me last century's method of connection: good ol' ADSL 1.  Tempted as I was to look elsewhere for something better, I refrained from doing so given that I would have the outlay of setup fees and contracts to sign up to.  So it was with heavy heart that I accepted their ADSL 1 connection.
Time passes.
They then contact me and tell me that I cannot even get their crappy service at my new location.
Shock.  Confusion.  They can provide no internet service to me.

But I get over it and cut them loose.

I go hunting for a new ISP, someone who deals in 21st century tech.  I find one - of course I do, you can't go 10 metres in this country without stumbling across a new ISP.  Looking at some of the names you'd swear some giant computer sits in a darkened room spewing out word fragments that nascent companies are scooping up to form ever-new permutations to use as their name.  Bits of "tech", "net", "tel" and the hip new letter "i" (replacing the has-been "e") and you could already generate names for half a dozen ISPs without trying.  But I digress.

So I sign up for an ADSL2+ account with an ISP that services my area.  They say it's all good, you're signed up, it might take just 5 or so business days before I have a connection.  Whatever. Let the good times roll.
And then, after a few days, I receive notification from them that despite me being told I was accepted and would shortly be connected, I was in actual fact unable to get internet access via them entirely.  Of course, this was not their fault, it was someone further upstream who'd provided the initial faulty go-ahead.  Of course.  Why would it be their fault?

Gar, off I go to try again.

With yet more searching I find a new ISP that, yes, does indeed service my area (sigh, sure) and signed up with them.  This time I get placed into a pending queue.  Apparently this can be for one of a number of reasons, but I was shortly contacted by the company and informed that in this area they used a Telstra DSLAM and the exchange had no free ports.  And I needed a free port to connect to.

This sort of thing happens now and again.  Companies have a finite amount of connections available in their exchanges for customers, and as the community's needs grow, the company needs to upgrade its infrastructure.  So normally you'd get thrown into a holding bin until there's suitable demand, at which point they fork out the cash, do an upgrade, connelct the new customers.
Wait a few weeks, maybe a few months is the usual line.  Something optimistically short to save you from despair.  Or looking elsewhere.
The game, however, has changed slightly in recent times.  The Australian government, for better or for worse, has come up with a plan to lay down and connect up fibre to the home.  High cost, high speed.  This has just begun recently, but the entire process will take quite some years to complete.  What this means, though, is that companies such as Telstra are not going to be overly-inclined to spend money on upgrades for copper wire networks that are going to see a perhaps massive drop in users over the coming few years.
Of course the ISP did not say this to me.  It's just something you (mis)read between the lines.  All they said was, "There are no ports available; we're cancelling your order."
Things were starting to look fairly bleak as the picture became clear.  In the area I was in, ISPs did not tend to have their own DSLAMs; they just used Telstra's.  And Telstra had no ports available for them.  And they, in turn, had no ports available for me.

I tried one more ISP in the hope that maybe there was something still available.  The vain hope that perhaps it was all just coincidence, and there really were ISPs that could provide a service to me.  Alas, after signing up I was placed in a holding bin once more, told that there were no ports available for me to connect to.  I was informed that it may take some time, but hopefully in the next couple of months I'd be good to go.  I waited a short time, of course, but to no avail.  A week later, with no progress, I cancelled the order myself.
Loss.
Despair.
Grief.
On the one hand, it was shocking to think that I would be unable to get internet access at all.  On the other hand, I knew that this wasn't strictly true.  For the alternative citizen there's always mobile internet.

Ah, mobile.  Mobile internet
Still, desperate times call for desperate measures.

I spend an evening wading through the wireless options.  Sort them, categorise them, filter them.  Let's cut out any options that charge excess fees, or charge you for data going up as well as down, or ... hang on, there's pretty much nothing left!
I finally settle for a wireless plan that doesn't look like it's been designed to empty my wallet as fast as possible.  I head on over to the ISP's sign up page, where they have a section for entering your address.  They use the Optus network and claim > 96% coverage.  No problem: I may live in an outer suburb, but it's not like I've moved under Uluru.
Imagine my surprise then when I find that, alas, coverage does not extend to my residence.
So, correction: it is rather like having moved under Uluru.
If they can't reach me then it stands to reason that other ISPs using the Optus network probably can't reach me either.
Options are starting to get very thin indeed.

Wireless with the incumbent Telstra looks to be about the only thing left to me.  I make the phone call.  They've got 99% coverage: there's simply no way that they can fail to reach me.
A little voice inside my head says that some people have to make up that other one percent.  That voice gets throttled.
I end up speaking to some cheery woman, who assures me that their wireless internet can indeed be provided to me: there are big sighs of relief all around (technically speaking I may have been the only one sighing with relief, but it was worthy of the sighs of several people).
We get to chatting and she waxes lyrical about the various Telstra products she's got, and how I can achieve various discounts by signing up for other services.  I'm enthused now too, so started jumping on board several services that I was needing/using anyway.  Hell, I was in such a good mood that when she brought up horoscopes (yeah, where does that come from in a "I'd like internet please" phone call?) that instead of going off on an hour long critique of the practice, I just professed ignorance of my own astrological star sign.  Let's get back to me supplying you with money for a service, lady.  Ooops, wait, good thing I never used those words.

So in the midst of this, by now, rather long phone call to Telstra, I happened to mention that the reason I was going with wireless was not because I web on the go, it was because I could not get ADSL.
Cue helpful lady.
Really?  she cried.  I'm sure you should be able to get ADSL.
No, my dear, I calmly replied.  I'm afraid I can not.
I shall look up your address on our ADSL system right away! she cried.
By all means, I sighed resignedly.
Gasp!  Yes!  You can have ADSL internet!  she cried.  (excitedly, I must add, should it not be apparent).
Madam, I was under the impression that there are no ports available on the local exchange, I hesitatingly prompted.
Really? she cried, I shall look immediately!

And within moments she had performed the requisite searches and was able to assure me that in fact Telstra did have a number of ports available on the local exchange.  Now, I was a little chary.  Understandably so, you can imagine, if you've read the ordeal so far.  But I took her up on her offer, cancelled the partly-completed entries for wireless and related services, verbally signed off, hung up on cheery woman and sat down to ruminate.

You see, until this point I didn't actually know that Telstra were out of ports on the local ADSL exchange.  This was merely something I had surmised from what other ISPs had stated.  It was entirely possible that Telstra did indeed have a small number of ports in reserve for their own (potential) customers.  A spreadsheet that I had seen, purporting to be up to date, claimed that there were a small number of ports available on that exchange.  I had dismissed it at the time as being unlikely, especially given that other ISPs were knocking me back.  But it makes sense if Telstra sell off ports in groups, and at some small threshold refuse to sell any more in order to prevent themselves from running entirely dry before they upgrade and add more.
Or at least that was some sort of thought process bubbling away.

So I'd got internet at long last.
Well, technically I still didn't, but it was acquired, sign-off, done and dusted.  I just had to wait for it to all be connected, which was, of course, just a matter of a few business days.
I wait a few business days.
I wait a few more.
I then get a letter in the mailbox from Telstra saying that it will be connected soon once I sort out some issues with them. Issues?  What issues?
I call them to see what the trouble is.  They want to know whether or not I was previously hooked up to another ISP at this address.  I had not.
Ah, excellent! they reply.
They can now complete the setup process and will send out the modem (to arrive after some few business days) and will connect the line (also after a few business days).  This was a 30 second call to initiate action that could have been done a week ago.
Irate sigh.

So maybe another week later a modem rocks up.  Fairly standard fare; a bit of hardware, some coloured cables and an installation CD should I want it.  It's a modem.  You plug it in, it works.  Or at least, that's what they did back in the old days.
I figured that by now the line should be activated and I should be able to receive a few packets.  I plugged the modem into the wall just to see what lights would dasblinken, but was dismayed to see power and status only.  The adsl light remained dead.  Figured I might as well hook the darn thing up to the PC, plug in some real values for username and password etc and see how the thing fares.
This is where I discovered Telstra modems are a little different from the sorts of modems that fly out of discount computer parts stores (hello MSY!).

I fire up a PC and load a browser and there's a million leftover tabs now all displaying some sort of Thomson software notice telling me that it's sorry but it can't help me get to my destination.  Speed software, or some such thing.  Now, I know that I can't get to my destination, I'm just here to jump to the internal web page of the modem.
I have to say that the way 192.168.1.254 just flies off the fingers probably says something about the quality of my modem connection in the past, and not something good.  If it rolled off any easier, the damn thing would be instinctive, like type dir in a cmd prompt, or ls in a terminal, or bye in an ftp session (apparently I have this instinctive urge to leave ftp rather than actually transfer a file, who'd have thunk it?).
Well, lo and behold, Thomson is also sorry that it cannot take me to this 192.168.1.254 address.
I have to admit the unexpectedness of this outcome was a little stupefying.
The first thing I thought of was that little installation disc.

Cue a flashback.

A couple of weeks ago when I'd been on the phone to cheery woman, she asked me what operating system I used.  Now, the phrasing of the question was something along the lines of "Do you use Windows(tm)?"  At this point there may have been a brief (dare I say ephemeral) flash of a thought regarding my home setup of linux boxen (at least one of which works, for certain definitions of "works").  But the words that came out, of course, were "yeah, sure".
It's the sort of thing that you immediately think, hey, that didn't sound too convincing.  But it's not a test.  Though if it was a test then I'd pass, because I'm awesome.  Except for the part where I told them that I run windows and so they sent me a windows installation CD.  Hmmm.
Of course, the reason you say Windows is because you're not really saying that you're running Windows.  Not explicitly.  This is not a question of which OS you are running.  This is not one of those times when you say "Debian" and get a follow-up question of "is that the Hurd kernel, or gnu linux, or bsd ...?".  You know you're just going to get a "sorry, did you say Seven?" response.  So you take the easy way out and give them some sort of vague generic yes windows response to save yourself several minutes of baffled questions.

Where was I?  Oh yes, recovering from the flashback with a windows CD in my hand and a linux box (sorry, gnu-linux box (waves to RMS)) in front of me.

Deciding to leave the CD as a last resort, I bash around until I figure out that the modem's internal webpage is on the 10.10 subnet.  With this access, I put in my username and password and check the webpage's access status.  With little hope, I should add.  And sure enough, there was no connection.

Looked like this CD setup was required after all.

I didn't have wine installed, not that it occurred to me at the time.  But I did have a windows box or two, perhaps, kicking around somewhere.  So I drag one back from the grave (it's amazing what one can do when the need is acute) with the most bare-bones skeleton of a windows installation you've ever seen. No service packs; no third party apps; and icons the size of my fist.  But it reads CDs, so I plonk the disc in the tray and run the setup.
Several steps later, I'm adding in details and nexting my way to a fully connected ADSL connection.  Except for the bit where it says it can't connect to Telstra and setup fails.
I want to pluck out my eyeballs.

So, modem fails to connect to the Telstra service.  It's the dasblinken lights.  It always comes down to the dasblinken lights.
I call up Telstra because I need help.
Now Telstra have got a pretty fandangled smart computerised phonebot service happening.  I'm getting asked various questions and voice recognition starts taking my (rather hesitant) answers and progressing along some sort of internal service path.  But at some point I lose my nerve and bail.  Really, it was more of a time issue than anything else.  But then the question was, what other time was I going to do this?  So I call back, and woah, like some sort of freaky stalking ex-girlfriend this thing's telling me that it knows I called recently and wants to know if we should continue where last we left off.   "Yes" I stated with more resolve than I felt.

The question structure of the Telstra phonebot was, I have to say, pretty good.  However, there was one question that I thought could have been better worded: is there an ADSL light on the modem?  The problem was that there was a little label for the ADSL connection being established, with a LED to indicate this: does this mean that I say yes because it's there, or no, because the LED is not lit up?  For the record, I went with the negative, then found out by the follow-up question that this meant they'd determined that I had a different modem to the one that I had, but, due to brilliance on my behalf (and perhaps some on the side of the Telstra phone software) I managed to get back on the right track.

The phonebot has gathered the requisite data and I'm passed onto a human.  This human female asks a few questions and confirms some details and then passes me off to another human who can better help me.  Now this chap starts at the very basics.  Like, do you see the modem?  Do you have a grey cable?  Which hole in the modem did you plug the cable into?
This was awkward because, one, I wanted to scream yes yes it's all fine but the damn line isn't activated!  And two, I was at work and didn't have the modem in front of me so had to dodgy-up some answers to satisfy him.  The grey cable one took a couple of promptings from me ("look, it's a grey cable and there's a grey hole on the modem and there's a yellow cable and a yellow hole on the modem and I plugged grey to grey and yellow to yellow.  And the grey ADSL one is RJ45 and the other one is not.  Yes yes, it's all good").
Finally we get to the part about the LEDs on the front, and with little prompting I'm able to tell him about the general meagre lightage and he's (yes, this is the exciting part) determined that it seems there might be an issue with the line (yes, yes!) and so he does a bit of looking at his end and determines that the line hasn't been activated.
Gar!
Which is frustrating, but rather what I was hoping, since it seemed the easiest thing to resolve.
He says he can activate it.  It'll just take a couple of days or something.

So theoretically my line is activated slash on the verge of activating.  I powercycle and cable-plug-deplug the modem on a OCD basis over the next few days, which turns into a week, with no result.
I ring up Telstra again to inquire why I have no internet access.
This time it was much simpler.
You have no internet access because you signed up for an ADSL 2+ account and there are no free ports.
"There are no free ports?", I say, somewhat dumbfounded, as I sit there at work with my colleagues standing around listening.
Do you know how hard it is to pay attention to someone on a phone call with people laughing their heads off?  Sigh.

I'm told that there are some free ADSL 1 ports, however.  It's slower, of course, but they can connect me for the same price that I was willing to pay for the higher speed.  Joy.
Now I just have to wait another couple of days for the line to be activated.
Cue me powercycling and cable-plug-deplugging the modem for some days again.  Which turns into a week.  Again.

I ring up Telstra to inquire as to why I *still* have no internet access.
You have no internet access because there are no free ports.
Well, yes, I spluttered irritably, I know there are no free ADSL 2+ ports, that's why I was told I'd be connected to ADSL 1.
Oh, no, she replied calmly, there are no free ADSL 1 ports either.
Which was the roundabout way of saying that that ADSL service you signed up for is not something we can deliver.  At all.

Anyway, this chick is sweetness and light itself, and tells me that I can get *cable* internet.  You know, I nearly burst out laughing at that point.  It was like the turning point where the cruel just becomes the absurd.
She waxed on about how great cable was, and how she thinks it's much better than ADSL, and that if she had the option she'd be like totally cable.  I acquiesced (what else could I do?) and signed up for a plan which was pretty much the same as the original ADSL one, except with transport provided by cable instead of copper.
She said that she's pretty sure that I should be able to get it.  It's there in my street, they just have to get a guy to go out and hook it up, it's unlikely that there'd be problems.
Sure, I said, and arranged a time and hung up.

Now, I have to say, that during my many phone calls with Telstra I spent a bit of time on their phonebot service, and a fair bit of time talking to humans and getting passed along from one department to the other.  I had Indian accents going to US accents to Australian accents.  And yet it all held together pretty well.  You never felt like you had to repeat info told to the previous department and you always felt like things were progressing (okay, that part wasn't supposed to be funny).  Even though the operators sometimes had to start with basic questions to ensure the equipment (that they couldn't see, after all) was hooked up properly, you at least got the impression that they knew what they were talking about and had some decent training.  So despite the bad rep that such service call centres tend to get, I found them to be pretty good.

Anyway, back to this tragedy.

I get a letter in the mail from Telstra telling me that they've actually decided to upgrade my ADSL exchange, so they'll be able to give me ADSL in a few months.  I swear they do it for the lulz.  I ignore it and wait for the cable guy.

Some more time passes.  I'm old by this stage, and nearing retirement, and it's been several decades since I last experienced the internet.  But a cable guy comes out to rectify all that (or at least the lack of internet access).
This chap wastes no time in hauling out gear, asking me where I want a cable point coming out of the wall (the very back of the house - the opposite corner in fact :p) and then he's off shoving cable down pipes.
I wait with baited breath.

The cable guy calls me out to the front with some concern.  Hell, when I see that the part of the street he's connecting it to is under my neighbour's nice, picturesque stone naturestrip then I become a little concerned too.  Damn, but it looks like there's a quarry out the front of his house now.  Well, I guess we all have to make sacrifices.
The cable guy asks me to shove cable up and down into a pipe at the side of the house whilst he takes a look-see out by the quarry where the cable should be coming out.    Surprise surprise, it's not.  With a little more poking and prodding down there he comes back and gives me the verdict.

"It looks like you're missing a chunk of pipe somewhere around your driveway, connecting your house pipe to the street pipe.  You're going to need someone to come out and dig fresh connecting pipe if you want to continue."

I thought about the fact that I'd have to consider letting the landlord know about this.  Not to mention the fact that I (slash landlord, which means I and we all know this) will have to pay once work leaves the nature strip.

With heavy heart I tell him to hold off organising anything whilst I think about my options.

"Sure thing", he replied, "Hey, have you thought about applying for ADSL?"



Addendum.

Received excessive Telstra phone bill.  They decided not to waste time and started charging me for internet access when I signed up: they managed to get a couple of months onto this bill.
After I explained how I was unable to get any internet access they said they'd cancel the charges.
And when she asked if there was anything else, I couldn't help myself and asked if she knew if the local exchange was still due to be upgraded shortly.  She said she didn't know, but suggested that the best course of action would probably be to sign up ...