Editorial Sun 21st February Current Affairs

Sixteen days without internet access. Lockdown meant my zoom meetings were conducted, over 8 hours, using phone data which emptied my bandwidth for the month. What had happened was a storm on the 5th of February took out cable access but left the wifi running without carrying a connection We could see the router was active, but there was no internet access. We contacted the estate agent who said they had contacted the landlord after coming over to turn the router on and off to no affect. Not knowing which ISP held the actual account, I searched online (using phone data) and found that NBN was down and slated to be fixed after the weekend.

During the weekend, I noticed the NBN fault had been fixed, but we still did not have internet, so I pointed out to the estate agent that no fault was reported for this address. They yelled at me, saying it was not their job to stay on the phone of an ISP and wait hours, but they had told the landlord who had promised to fix it. I pointed out the landlord might need to be told to report the issue to the ISP to fix it. They said they got my point, but had already told the landlord. “Have a good day sir!” they yelled before hanging up.

I contacted radio 3AW to report the issue. Neil Mitchell had me waiting forty minutes before not listening to me, or following up.

One other member of the household noticed our landlord had not collected their mail from Optus, an ISP, and opened it, discovering that our share house was due to have internet cancelled because NBN did not want to compete with Optus Cable. But the cancellation was for the 15th of February or later, and should not have happened yet. The information was relayed to the estate agent who passed it on to the landlord. I contacted 3AW to provide an update by email. Still no reply from 3AW.

The estate agent tasked an employee to wait on premises until Optus sent a technician. But, Optus claimed they had sent a technician a day before and they had not got on premises when everyone in the household was here during lockdown. They claimed to have rung the bell and made commotion, but they had not noticed the Menulog and DoorDasher employees delivering food without issue. The estate agent spent all day on the premises and Optus did not show up. Finally, on 19th of February, two weeks after the internet had gone down, Optus showed, and an estate agent was on hand. The fault was fixed, it having been established that Cable provision would be ongoing until a planned changeover to NBN.

My software upgraded and at 1am on 20th February while Melbourne had had an overnight 26 degree centigrade evening, the wifi router stopped working. I contacted the agent about 7:30 am and sent a picture of my WiFi reception showing our address router was not functioning. They did not even bother sending someone to turn it on and off. Maybe Monday?
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