| Greg's Telstra line fault in Echunga |
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As almost every year, when the rains set in, the phone lines fail. In the weekend of 15 July 2006 we had particularly heavy rains: the Bureau of Meteorology reported 76 mm of rain from 9 am 16 July to 9 am 17 July. No doubt this is the background for the subsequent failure:
See the DSL statistics page for a description of these values.
Compared to the previous failure, though, there are some significant differences:
The failure was sudden, with no warning. Last year it was preceded by over a day of reduced line quality.
The DSL line went down at the same time as the phones—I think. I don't use the phones much, but I recall a phone call coming in for Yvonne earlier in the day.
My guess is that another line went down first, and that they shut down the backhaul for the entire cable at this point.
This had to happen, of course, when I was the only person in my department (MySQL replication and backup) who wasn't on vacation. Murphy strikes again. Called Telstra, and for once managed to find my way through their horrible voice menu system, which spent 5 minutes trying to test the line before transferring me to Alison with no information (neither the fact that I was reporting a fault, nor the results of the test, nor even the phone number against which it was reported). She logged fault number 120947258 and got John to test the line and call me back, saying, of course, that the line was defective; less plausible is his statement that they should have it working tomorrow. Doubtless they'll send the elite troop of flying pigs.
What a pain it is to not have a network! Almost everything that I do needs some network access. Yes, in most cases you can work around it, but that's really irritating. In the afternoon, the network came back, but only with greatly reduced margins; instead of the standard 1500 kb/s down and 256 kb/s up and the more typical noise margins of 12 dB and 23 dB respectively, it only had 448 kb/s down and 64 kb/s up, and noise margins of 6 dB and 4 dB.
Went down the road to tell the Telstra crew of the problem, but there was no crew; further investigation revealed that the phones were still down. The return of the ADSL line must have been due to the cable drying out. It would have been a bit of a surprise to see the Telstra people there in less than 24 hours, anyway.
The DSL line stayed up all night and went down just before I got up, at 08:10; after it had been down for some hours, decided that it probably meant that the Telstra technicians were working on it, so down to take a look. Not surprisingly, they were about 50 metres from last year:
The fenced off area on the left is the site of the fault in February 2003. They put the “fence” up after the repair; I don't know why, but there's nothing visible inside.
The cable was particularly badly mangled this time. This is the way it came out of the ground:
The linesmen weren't in any hurry to get the cable fixed, and it didn't come back until 15:00:
Still, it's the first time ever that Telstra has repaired this kind of cable fault within the time legislated by the Customer Service Guarantee. About the only thing I can complain about is that it's ridiculous to leave people without network connectivity for over 2 days; but it'll be years before that becomes a general opinion.
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