Opinion: The return of the vista

Having bought your broadband service via a third party means you have to call them first, and after they admit they haven’t got a clue what you’re on about, you get a trouble ticket followed by a call from your ISP, in our case Telstra rather than BigPond, having opted for the “business-class” ADSL offering.

First off, the caller wasn’t really a techie but somebody whose job it is to screen calls to their techs so they won’t get hassled by nongs. Fair enough from their perspective but a tad annoying when you’re not a nong, but then who on earth would ever think they were a nong? OK, having passed the nong-test, we got a call from a real live Telstra tech. We explain our problem with their new 2-Wire modems. (That’s the brand name not how many wires it uses. Well, all right, it might also be how many wires it uses. But that’s not important right now.)

Regular readers will recall the 2-Wire modem was using PPPoA instead of the usual PPPoE on the ADSL link and that had our replacement Netgear router a little perplexed. It knew about the PPPoA but it wasn’t all that happy to connect without a few more parameters plugged into the blanks on the configuration web-page - answers to which had so far eluded everyone, including the tech who just called. When we finally explained that it wasn’t us that required PPPoA but the 2-Wire thingy, our friendly tech said the DSLAM at the Telstra exchange should automatically switch to whatever we wanted.

He also told us that with Telstra’s direct service, unlike the BigPond service, they couldn’t care less what you hang on the end of the ADSL as long as it doesn’t fry their kit at the exchange, and as long as you don’t call them for help when it doesn’t work. The Telstra techie told us they only supplied the link, and he’d remotely kick the DSLAM into automatic mode just in case it was being a bit picky. He said if we plugged in our kit and set it the way we wanted, then the exchange should comply. Hmmm. That didn’t happen last time we sat and stared at the blinking lights for what seemed like an eternity.

Now it’s not that we’re inherently distrustful of tech advice, but we were faced with a four-hour drive in order to test the latest advice, so it was with some degree of trepidation that we loaded up the Jeep and hit the highway. We’re talking about the Pacific Highway on the north coast of NSW, a road which politicians of all flavours have been using to get elected and re-elected over many decades with promises of upgrades. However, we were soon reminded that use of the term ‘highway’ requires a large degree of literary licence. We’re guessing that “glorified goat-track” wouldn’t get them as many votes.

...continued tomorrow...

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