Comments on: Problem isolation 101

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 23:40:54 +0000

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 :)

By: Alan Green

Alan Green — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 11:47:23 +0000

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 22:41:47 +0000

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?

By: Julian

Julian — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 04:00:12 +0000

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?

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 22:48:40 +0000

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.

By: Alastair

Alastair — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 21:10:27 +0000

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.