I just had a Telstra technician (a real Telstra guy – not a contractor) come and fix my phone line.
What seems to have happened is that the technicians who originally came out to fix our neighbour’s problems got confused with the network layout. The cabling that runs up the street is very old (60+ years the Telstra guy reckons), and is basically non-operational.
There is actually a second set of cabling that runs past our house – newer cables that have been working well. Unfortunately, the pit where the cabling comes to our house is hidden … right next to the obvious pit with the old cabling in it. Nobody discovered it until they took a guess after studying the network diagrams more carefully today. They had to dig it up!
Anyway, it seems that when the original contractor was playing with the cabling for next door – he got confused, cut ours, and then tried to reconnect it – but instead connected it to the old cables – not the new ones.
The Telstra guy today worked it out pretty quick once he found the new pit and reconnected our service. He came in, tested our line – and confirmed it was working. The only hiccup was when I tried our phone – still no dial tone. It seems that they have swapped the phone line back to the other line (we have two lines into our house – one of which is no longer in use). I just had to swap to the other phone socket, and it started working. ADSL came up shortly afterwards … not as fast as I’ve been getting – but close enough to not matter (it might improve over time once things have settled down – they are still digging out on the footpath to fix next door’s problems).
Anyway – I’m back online so I can finally get some work done – yay.
The one question that is bugging me is – How did you possibly remain sane all that time?????