Firstly, can the NBN be discussed here? If not just close / delete this thread.

In early March I received a letter stating that NBN is available in my area, and that I had 18 months to switch over or get cut off.

This was hard to believe because I had seen no work in the area to install it.

A few weeks later I discovered a bunch of NBN men in the front yard digging it up to lay a white pipe from the telephone pit out the front up to the wall of my house. No notice, no knock on the door or anything, just dived in.

Then last week, I noticed a white box was now attached to the end of the pipe and the house, which means a cable has been laid in. I don't know if it's fibre or some other type of cable.

What do I do now? Is it Telstra's job to connect the white box to my computer, or is that NBN's job? The white box is on one side of the house, but the computers are on the other side so I need a cable run between them.

Do I also need a NBN modem/router thingy, or does the white box do that?

Hopefully one of you brainy guys will know.

I hope that this Thread is allowed to be discussed .... as I will be be going through the same process in a couple of months.

They actually need prior written permission to do anything on your property unless you rent. Anything outside your front fence they don't need permission.

They actually need prior written permission to do anything on your property.

Well, they made no effort to get that, or indeed to contact me at all.

Hi Rob, hell you are one lucky duck! I live in Toongabbie in Sydney and the ex NBN guy ( stood down no more suburb work) who fixed my 60 year street copper cables for the 50th time as they die from corrosion (lead wrapped WW2 trunking) told me I wont be getting NBN for about 1000 years as we live in a safe Labour seat and NO ONE in this electorate has a chance. Its very frustrating as my son who lives a couple of K away in a swinging Labour seat had Juila Gillard personally dig up the street and wire it up herself to their modem. As soon as Labour got the boot no more work was done. Oh I fibbed about Miz JG doing the work, it was actually a ream of guys! Anyway i'm mainly wireless now using the laptop and phone so they can pretty much shove the NBN up their lead sheath cable. Pity though the son runs a business involving web hosting and the speeds are amazing and dead reliable.
It would be interesting to hear a comment from a member that actually works for NBN co or knows what is going on about NBN..
Fred.

I know what you mean Joseph Stalin is still alive and well, laying NBN cables here in Clare!

Firstly, can the NBN be discussed here?

It can, as can any subject really - it's General Discussion.

My NBN is wireless. I went to one of the Senate inquires & it was a revelation. Skymesh copped huge flack. Apparently you cannot get compensation from NBN & in Ballarat the council has 6500 complaints another council has 20,000. Ballarat has estimated the cost to repair infrastructure not restored properly, at $13M.

It is a shemozzle. This is only the tip of a huge iceberg.

Marc

If Bigpond Cable is available in your area you will most likely get cable. It can already deliver 100Mbit to Bigpond customers in many areas so that will be that. If not it'll likely be VDSL via a roadside cabinet. Anyone can still get fibre straight to their house but there is a big price to pay for that.

If a box has been attached to the side of your house, that will be where your household phone/Net cabling will terminate to. So before you can get connected, there needs to be a copper pair or coaxial cable run in to where you'd like your socket. Under the NBN rules this socket has to be adjacent to a power point as you aren't allowed to connect the modem with an extension lead or power board.

It is unusual that the connection crew would come in and bulldoze your yard without giving some notice. I'd be a bit peeved if that happened to me, particularly if they did a rough job and in some cases they do do a rough job. Plenty of pictures showing rough workmanship on the Whirlpool forums.

I am not really in a hurry to get the NBN. Too many people have complained about slow speeds and unreliable connections for me to be bothered with it. I certainly won't be connecting this site through it until I know that the connection I get is as reliable as the one I have now.

I guess Bigpond cable is here, as most of the neighbours have Foxtel, but I never bothered. By coincidence (or not), mine was the only house to have this NBN work done.

Good luck enforcing the modem directly to the power point. If I did that I'd have to put the other 9 things into the other power point... obviously that is not going to happen.

Currently I have a telephone, but when I switch to NBN the phone and number will be done away with. There's plenty of other ways to contact me.

there needs to be a copper pair or coaxial cable run in to where you'd like your socket

Who does that? NBN or someone else?

Regarding access, as I understand it PMG/Telecom/Telstra has some sort of right under some Act to traverse private property for the purpose of laying or maintaining its copper network. I guess NBN has inherited such access.

In days gone by, you could expect some sort of civility from phone technicians when it came to such work, at least to the extent of a door knock. That seems to have gone out the window when Telstra was privatised and the work was largely doled out to private contractors.

NBN is being rolled out by contractors, many of whom appear to be using personnel on 457 visas. Recently I have been watching such teams laying the infrastructure in the streets around my workshop. Although I have registered the complex with the NBN, I have no idea when or if I will be contacted by them in relation the actual connection of the NBN to the various units within. I have had difficulty finding out what process is involved. By now I would have expected some sort of advance team to be visiting and assessing the sites for connection issues and liaising with the appointed contacts.

On Monday, I will attempt to cut through the humongous NBN bureaucracy to find someone who can fill me in on what's going to happen next.

Who does that? NBN or someone else?

NBN's responsibility ends at the point where they install their equipment inside your premises.

http://blog.iinet.net.au/where-to-install-your-nbn-boxes/

Lack of communication & failure to follow up by NBN was mentioned. Apparently towns like Mansfield Vic are not getting fibre to the node its all going to be wireless.

The guy that installed mine had little more than a field strength meter & an adjustable wrench (that bit's Australian). To get a hole through a metal wall, we ended up using my stuff. One neighbour has his antenna on the roof looking through trees so the three signal lights shuffle back & forth mainly orange., if it was on a verandah post it could have looked under the trees. The other one no signal several months to do something about it.

Robbert,

Sounds like you have had Fibre installed...lucky you as the rest of us on the hybrid system will possibly face years of problems with NBNCo using the old and basically stuffed Telstra network from the street pillar onwards. The big issue there in using the ageing copper cables is that there is NO DC being fed down the wires which in the past would break down any tendency for joints to go open circuit or Hi Res at best.

The little white box outside is the Fibre connection point to your premises & from there the contractors are "supposed" to run another small fibre especially for buildings to where the power point is located and basically where YOU want the NBN Modem box to be located which then feeds out up to 2 phone lines and 4 data ports over Cat 5 cable to your computer modem.

This link should take you to the NBNCo info PDF which pretty much explains it all.
Link : http://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco/documents/nbn-fibre-user-guide.pdf

A lot of the contractors want to be in & out of your premises as quickly as possible so will most likely if you are NOT looking simply punch a hole through your wall from the other side of the wall where the white cable box is and bung the NBNCo Modem on the wall directly behind that box. Often NOT what most folks desire and you have the legal right to get them to run the internal fibre optic flex tail to wherever YOU want that Modem box...within reason.

Also be aware that when the street mains go off your service also goes OFF and that includes phone AND computer access and you CAN get a battery backup installed but yah gotta push em to do that & as yet we do not know what that cost will be ( we are approaching NBNCo service in our area) BUT a small UPS you provide CAN power that fibre modem, your modem for the computer and a normal corded phone will work through the power fail.

Some contractors get a bit stroppy if they see a UPS sitting there as they have been trained to only plug their NBN modem into a bloody power point & nought else plus many only have rudimentary training so know nothing else.

IF you currently have ADSL at your premises then most likely that ADSL modem will simply plug straight into the NBN modem but it has to be near it OR within reasonable distance for Cat 5 cable to be run.

So whomever your ADSL & phone service provider is NOW talk to them about your options for having their service provided via the NBNCo system and that also will involve having your phone line rearranged so that it can be plugged into the NBNCo modem. Your ld phone line is most likely terminated buy means of screw terminals but the NBNCo box needs a RJ11 plug to get the phone line to interconnect to whatever you have currently installed.

That is why it is often best to have the NBNCo modem box installed within close proximity to where your current comms setup is located & NOT just where one of the contractors wants it just for HIS convenience...they are supposed to negotiate with each client as to where things are to go.

We have ADSL here at home over copper & its NBN ready so when our time comes shortly I will take the Line plug out and insert a Cat 5 patch cord (RJ45 connectors) into our ADSL box which is also a wireless router and the other end into the NBNCo modem box mounted where their box is GOING to go..no question of that in our place.

The phone which for us is a Commander T105 & that line will plug into a RJ11 plug that goes into the old 610 (cream coloured 6 pin phone sockets) and our Commander will still function.

Here the lot is UPS fed anyway so no worries when the mains fail. With a bit of luck we might get better than the 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds.

At least my service provider (iiNet) has been proactive & been in touch to see what our needs are & I am surprised that yours whomever that might be has not been in touch with you already...maybe it is Telstra who seem to be on the back foot a bit and have lost a lot of customers simply switching providers because Telstra has been slow to react to NBNCo changes in various areas.


Lindsay

Thanks for the link GTC, and the pdf document Kakadumh. They make it clear that the NBN person must supply the missing cable, and also the connection box (what used to be a modem) inside this room. Now I guess I wait for someone to just turn up when I'm here.

As mentioned before I'm not going to bother with a telephone, so the only port I'll use will be the designated data port (when I find out which one that is).

I currently use ADSL2+ which is supposed to give 24M, but I've never had more than 6M. If the NBN really is fibre, maybe, perhaps, I'll actually get to have 100Mbits (or whatever it is). Yet in other countries (Europe in particular), 1G is the norm, and at reasonable prices (5 euros/month in Finland).

Oh yes Lindsay you are correct - my ISP is Telstra, and of course they have not said a word.

*Now, another question, currently my IP address is Dynamic, like most people. If I get a bad one, or some site has IP-blocked it, I can just reboot my ADSL modem and get a new address, and then I can do whatever it was I wanted to do. With the NBN, what's the story there? If I want a new address can I turn off/on the connection box? Or what? Any ideas?