[LINK] FTTN - the excitement continues...

[David Lochrin]

My POTS service has just been restored after an outage of over a week, and Telstra stated a number of subscribers in the area were affected.  I hear Moss Vale subscribers also had a two-week outage recently.

It so happens that NBN Co. are busy installing FTTN around the Southern Highlands, and a technician had left one half of the pair carrying my service dangling in fresh air in the pit near the bottom of the driveway.  (Interestingly, ADSL still worked on one wire, presumably using a capacitive path to earth.)  My informant was keen to tell me NBN Co. were responsible, not Telstra, and the whole issue had been escalated to management.

One wonders how much thought & planning has gone into cooperation between the POTS / Telstra arm and the NBN Co. installation people.  Are hastily trained NBN installers going around creating havoc in the POTS network?  And why would they need to touch the copper cabling between a node and its connected subscribers anyway?  

If a landline 'phone fails most people can use their mobile.  But if MTM cable-TV failed on a big TV night there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth in the land!!

David L.