roof finished, still no NBN

 The roof is finished, the back room is drying out slowly.. Still nothing from TBS about our NotBN service or the phones; If these services were critical to life, we would all be dead by now....I don't know why I am bothering waiting for Telstra..we may just pull the request and seek another solution altogether.. 

Rainy blues

We had a load of Colorbond roofing dropped into the front garden last week, now we are waiting on the guttering and flashing to arrive along with the roofing guys from Ridgways, and for it to stop raining long enough for them to do the roof! 

The insurance guys came and looked at the interior damage which is worse than we thought, new room lining, carpeting and flooring in part...gunna run into serious money.

Meanwhile back at the network, still waiting on TBS to fix the phones and the proper NBN connection..However, with all the Covid-19 stuff going on, I am not holding my breath.. 

DTV/DAB+ wobblies

We have an older Panasonic DTV (that does HD) but the signal from Mt Dandenong is a bit borderline here (noise, pixelation). I added a 4G filter ahead of our antenna amplifier/splitter, got rid of the the 4G crud, but reduced the signal. Maybe time for a better VHF only TV antenna (cf Silicon Chip Feb 2018). We disn't have this much trouble when we had old fashioned steam analog PAL colour tv transmissions. Likewise DAB+ radio is very fussy compared to plain AM/FM..  

Still waiting on Telstra Business Systems to hook us upto the interwebs and get the phones reconnected...

temporary NBN

We now have a month-to month NBN connection via MyRepublic to save on the cost of Telstra 4G router connection (handy but slow - 200Gb limit). Still waiting on Telstra Business Systems to progress our phone porting and network connection..We'll see how it goes..

Email is back (more or less)

from yesterday, we have email! Arranged email hosting with carringbush.net (who seem to be on the ball with Web, email, DNS etc) and redelegated our domain to their DNS servers. some farting about with Thunderbird and it all appears to go ok. A small win!
Still no joy on the phones or NBN connection..

Waiting, waiting...

Have cancelled the iiNet arrangments, despite the best effort of a young chap in Corporate, they seem to be unable/unwilling to at least get us back to where we were on May 20 in the morning (pre NBN).
I have arranged a 4G mobile router which is plugged into one of the switches; at least we can get the gmail and banking and such. I am arranging with the local Telstra business shop to do the phones and they are looking at a connection that gets us back on the email/dns/web service wise via the NBN. Anecdotally, NBN FTTC has a rather spotty reputation especially with installations to older wiring in established areas...

Downgrade with NBN

The NBN guy arrived last week, redid connections in the pit out the front, and confirmed that the white NBN box that arrived from iiNet was talking to the NBN; we then found that now have no phones (iiNet dropped the ball on porting the numbers from Telstra), no email, no DNS, no outgoing Web server connectivity) (iiNet just plain lied when we enquired about upgrading from a working ADSL2+ service with routing, saying they could do this, no probs)What we got was some strange NAT thing (sans routing) on a scungy TPlink VR1500v cheapy router (also from iiNet), which allows  you to visit some web sites; that's it. They then claimed that they [iiNet] were unable to route our traffic anymore because 'NBN was different'. I had to complain on their FB page comments, just to get a response..

We are now looking for a local technically-competent ISP to get back 'on the air' as it were.
An old friend of mine who also has an NBN connection through iiNet, moved house recently, when he got reconnected, iiNet had managed to mess up and lose his email accounts, only after he complained on FB, did something get done to fix the problem.
iiNet long ago were the bees knees of ISP's, but since they got taken over by TPG (an iffy bunch, at best), the whole operation has gone down the toilet..