Last night I came home to find that the phone line wasn’t working properly. We had a stack of static.

My first thought was that the battery was low on the wireless handset. I didn’t think much of it until I noticed my ADSL was acting really flakey. I rang the ISPs support line and was greeted with a message that Telstra, Australia’s own monopoly telco, was having issues Australia wide, and that users would be updated at 10 p.m. I stuck on the line and hoped that this was my problem.

After the ten minute wait I spoke with the helpdesk, who informed me that I shouldn’t be seeing the issues because I was on one of their DSLAMs, not one from Telstra.

By this stage I was pretty certain that I knew what the issue was, and it wasn’t one that I wanted. Disconnecting everything bar a standard wired land line proved my theory. The line itself had gone bad.

We’ve had some pretty rough weather in WA in the last week, and I live in an old area of Perth. The house we own was built in 1939, which in these parts in ancient. So I theorized that my line has been damaged, perhaps by the amount of water.

So what’s this mean. Well, I have to wait up to five business days for Telstra to get it’s act together and test the line. I hope this means it’ll be resolved first go. Who knows though. I could be “off the air” for longer.

Fortunately the answer to the question, “What does a geek do without broadband?”, is leach. I’ve already been given permission by my neighbor to connect to his wireless network. Having said that, I won’t have the freedom I normally have. So expect patchy podcasting in the short term.

Anyone have a good contact in Telstra?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2005 at 4:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.