If the power goes out, a swarm of technicians and engineers immediately spring into action to get the electricities flowing again as fast as possible, come rain or shine.
If a water main bursts, plumbers come from far and wide to fix it.
But seemingly, if an NBN optic fibre is damaged, stopping the data flow to and from streets, whole suburbs or even towns… crickets. Especially if that happens on a Friday afternoon.
This is the second time it has happened here. The first time took 5 days to get back up and running, with a fault I the pit right out the front of my house. It took a phone call to the local Federal member to get something done though.
As we are in a particularly bad phone signal area, calling your ISP via a smartphone becomes almost impossible without the wi-fi connection to the NBN.
And anyway, all they can do is log the fault back to the NBN as unlike power, water or gas, the consumer can’t actually contact NBNCo and say they have a problem.
Doubly irritating is that the NBN’s very own website which lets you check your address for an outage, says you are all fine. Nothing to see here – except the baleful red eye of the optical link LED on the NBN box on the wall saying their website is wrong.
Surely in this day and age of data, the NBN should be classified as an essential service the same as power, water and gas, and if it goes down, heaven and earth are moved to get it back up again.
Oh and as a final kicker, apparently, as a business, if you lose money over the communications outage, there is no recourse. Doesn’t affect me personally as such, but my wife runs a cottage industry that relies on the internet, and if this is not back up by tomorrow morning, then she’ll possibly have to cancel the day(s) until it is up and running again.
The NBN / internet is brilliant, it’s just the support service behind it that sucks.