[LINK] NBN fault maintenance

[David]

Parts of the Sydney Inner-West currently have no NBN service.  NBN describe the outage as "infrastructure restoration" and it occurred around early afternoon on Friday.  According to NBN updates, the technician who investigated requested level-2 backup but, believe it or not, this cannot be arranged until Office Hours on Monday.

And on a related matter, I'm told by a field technician that the Arris boxes (HFC / Ethernet protocol converters) supplied to those with an HFC connection are notoriously unreliable.  One found that 15 out of 20 devices in two boxes of 10 were faulty.  That figure probably isn't typical, but they certainly fail frequently and a simple box like that should have an MTBF measured in decades.

How is such organisational incompetence possible?

When Telstra is eventually rescued by being allowed to buy the NBN we will have turned full circle, from Howard's privatisation of Telecom Australia, through the Three Amigos' network wreck, to the Rudd NBN, and then back to the Howard model.  But we'll be reduced to a hotch-potch network with no end-to-end technical standards or quality control, and customer premise equipment for the most part made cheaply in China, to no national standard regarding ring-tones, etc., and probably with at least one back door.

David L.