And for the n-th year in a row, the first decent week of winter rain in Sydney has knocked out hundreds of phone lines as the water seeps into crumbling cable pits and shorts out the corroded copper wire. Half of my old street is out (again) and one of my customers has lost half their business' lines. Hopefully their building won't catch fire in the two weeks they've been quoted to have it fixed because their back-to-base fire alarm is one of the lines that died. How anyone thinks a modern economy can cope using copper wire that's more than 60 years old and falling to pieces I don't know.
Our water heater broke last month. Even though we knew it was getting near its end of life about two years ago we didn't replace it preemptively at the time because we preferred to spend the money on replacing the antique fridge with the dodgy seals and install safety switches (along with fixing a bit of dodgy wiring we found). We figured we could live without hot water for a few days compared to the other options.
Ah what does the sun look like these days, shiney? Certainly not the best weather the last month. Rain, rain and lots more rain to this part of Queensland
What's imaginary about it, there is heaps of it around now. The really funny thing is going to fibre is cheaper in the long run ;p
"Conroy Cable" - you get cut off because the sub contractor that installed the fibre comes back a week later and tears it back up because he has figured out that the unions are right for once - the quickest way for a subcontractor to go broke is to have anything to do with the NBN. Of course we need to move past the copper network, I spent enough time behind an exchange test desk to know what it is like, but you must believe in unicorns if you think that a broke government that is even more degraded and unreliable than a cable pit full of water with a cable joined with Scotch Locks at the bottom can deliver fibre to every home.
It has nothing to do with the use of copper, which is perfectly ok. It has everything to do with sloppy workmanship, which may not be any different using fibre.
That sounds like the modern state of government whatever the medium. Why would Telstra take the time/investment to bother to fix the copper cables when the government constantly interfeers in the free market and states it will legislate to forcefully buy the copper network and shut it down? But the timeframe and arrangements are always changing and nothing is certain so who can make any plans at all. Telstra is in private (public) hands. Are we a fascist country where the government controls private companies by force and tells them how to run their own affairs and assets? Or a free market country where Telstra can plan to use their own assets in service of their customers (us!). I know what I'd prefer. Hey Conroy are you listening, take off your black red and white arm bands and get out of the way.
I used to dig and lay the conduits for all communications and power cables along with water and sewage. Every new subdivision or suburb was required to provide such services as part of development approval, it was built into the price of a pissy little 600mt square block of land. It has been so for the last ten years at least. The laying out of cable is a highly technical process of blowing a plastic bag with a piece of string attached to it through the piping with a leaf blower and then attaching a piece of rope to the string which then needs to be pulled through until the end of the rope reaches the other end, once that happens the really technical work of attaching the fibre cable to the rope takes place. Mind you this only happens if the original contractors failed to put in place the blue and white rope that is a normal piece of construction when laying down the original conduits, normally each length of piping involved running out rope with which to draw every piece of power or communication through the kilometres of pipe laid. Each little household is provided with a sand laden terminal of correct conduit to provide both of the above for all the little green boxes people see outside their new houses, orange for power white for communications, both in the same little boxes. The big and huge problem for all now days is the old tech copper, and of course the cost of electrickery. Subsidies for those able to afford each or either under the new regime lead to increased cost for those who scrape by and benefits for those who can afford neither. In the end it leads to those who can not afford paying for those who can and increased cost's all round. Subsidies for green dreams paid by those who get nothing and also bear the total cost in the end, the same will happen for those who incur the cost of the NBN, the many will pay for the few in an anti competitive cesspool of dysfunction. A big fat white elephant that few will benefit from and a select few will profit from at the expense of the average citizen. Just what was the original price for this abortion of an idea ?
I recently moved 3 months ago into a new estate that was NBN ready. We had absolutely no phone lines at all! Instead each home had the optic fiber laid inside conduit up to our front garage doors. People have been living here for the last 7 months, but until 2 weeks ago we had no NBN. Most people had to use 'no fixed contract' 3g dongles from vodafone, telstra or optus to get connected to the internet while NBNco got their shit together. Online with it now it's really no different from then ADSL2, but their is a little less lag when playing BF3 [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaCERM2fuHc[/youtube]
^^^^ that's what I'm doing now (not the BF3..more of a World of Tanks fan )... even at my new digs... been a month, still no phone or internet.
