Problem isolation 101
10-Jan-2006What are the chances that the Optus technician who came around to decommission our cable television service yesterday might have something to do with our cable Internet access dying at the same time?
It’s only going to take Optus two days to send another technician around to investigate what might be wrong. My idea of calling the technician who had been at our house two hours earlier didn’t seem to appeal to the call centre agent. They were keen to talk about how much it would cost me if it was my fault, but not very keeen to talk about compensation if the fault was theirs.
Odd that they should even send a tech to decommission you. The two times I’ve disconnected from cable TV (Comcast in the US, Foxtel in Australia), I’ve just been told to unplug the box and bring it to a retail outlet.
I guess CableCARD is the right solution to the problems here, but I don’t know if the Australian cable TV operators are even considering it.
I had thought that when they said they were coming around to pick up the set top box they would just be coming around to pick up the set top box.
Apart from picking up the box, they seem to have opened the cable enclosure on the outside of our house too. Maybe they suspected part of the set top box was hiding in there too.
I once lived in a household with three of those white boxes on the side of the house (we had cable Internet, cable TV and three phone lines). My recollection is a bit vague, but I seem to recall an Optus technician once knocking on our door hoping to recycle one of them if it wasn’t in use.
Perhaps you were visited by an overly keen Optus recycler too?
Problem solved this morning in about 2 minutes. A technician arrived, heard me say “Happened at the same time as our cable TV was disconnected” and put up a ledder. He unscrewed a rectangular box, unplugged one of the two coax cables, and plugged the other one in. Modem synced. All is good again.
I’m still miffed that the first technician didn’t regression test my other services before he/she left. How hard could it be?
Thankyou for reminding me of just one of the reasons why I left Optus cable. One of the techos (there are different ones for TV, phone and modem) said that they often have problems in installations that take all three services.
I am considering Optus’ DSL service… depends whether iinet are going to lift their game or not.
What problems are you having with iiNet? A few people here have joined up with them and they’re very impressed.
I was contemplating going to them then this happened to me. Then Optus increased the uplink speed to 256k, and I’m getting 10Mbits/s on downloads now too… so I’m putting my single bad service experience out of my mind for now :)