So it's not been a great way to start the new year. On Monday night here we had an electrical storm, that, while being spectacular, resulted in a blackout in my area for about 4-5 hours on Monday night. No big deal. However, when the power was restored, the NBN went down.
So I tried resetting the modem without any luck. Called Internode on Tuesday morning, and was on the phone for about 35 minutes with them as we went through a factory resent of the modem, only for them to say that the fault must lie with NBN, and that a ticket had been lodged with them and it would take around 48 hours for them to fix it.
In the meantime, I also spoke to my neighbour, and found out that she was also on the NBN (with Optus) and that she had the same issue. So at least that indicated that it wasn't just me that had the issue.
So I wait 3 days, just to make sure, and still no internet. Call internode back, and they say that NBN had fixed some issue in the system, but it hadn't resolved the issue at my address, so now they need to send a technician out to look at it in the home. So the earliest time they can get here will be 8am-12pm on Tuesday, so the whole weekend will be without the NBN. And even when the technician gets here, there is no guarantee that they can fix it.
In the meantime, I'm running a portable hotspot on my phone, and drawing down all my data on my phone plan, which is only 5GB per month. Fortunately, it monthly period finished on Tuesday, and so I've just restarted for another month, but in the space of 2 days I've already used 1.2 GB of my monthly 5GB plan.
This demonstrates two further points to me:
1) How fragile is the fucking NBN if all it takes is for one fucking electrical storm for it to cripple a system for at least a week, and what will, in all likelihood based on my previous experience, take well more than that. I understand an electrical storm can do major fucking damage, but it should be this fucking hard to restore the system. And if it wasn't for me chasing it up all the time, would it get fixed at all? I've said this before, but heaven help an elderly person or someone form a non-English speaking background that would have to go through this. Seriously, WTF???
2) I've become acutely aware of how reliant I am now on the Internet for the delivery of my information and entertainment. This outage has reduced my capacity to get regular internet and email, but it's also stopped my gaming, and has obviously halted the delivery of my Foxtel Now, Netflix, and Amazon Prime (which I signed up to recently). I've really sort of put all my eggs in one basket in this respect, and is probably one of the dangers of trying to be an early adopter of OTT services. I always wanted to put as much load on the NBN as possible, as my way of forcing the NBN to try and get their shit together, and to also force companies like Foxtel to improve their customer service and content delivery, by forcing them into realising that this is where consumption is heading, but if the fucking NBN can't get their shit together, seriously I sometimes wonder, what's the fucking point?
If you can't already tell, I'm really annoyed and frustrated with this outage.
I will try and speak to my neighbour again to see if they are having the same problems again, as they may also need a technician to come out as well. How the fuck does that happen? Can't the NBN see that two fucking addresses right next to each other are having the same fucking issue, and yet have to solve each one separately? What kind of fucking redundancy is that??
It also made me revisit an idea a mate of mine had about the poor state of the NBN. He once said that the shitty NBN will drive people towards black-market internet, and there might be something in that. If there was a private or black-market internet service I could access that guaranteed high speeds, I would definitely consider getting it, considering the shitty experience I've had with the NBN so far.
Amazon Prime is ok - good program on there with Aaron Paul called The Path, about him wanting to leave a cult. Obviously The Grand Tour is on there. NFL was on there for Thursday Night Football, but the regular season is over, so no more NFL games there. I'll see if I like it, or if anyone else wants to share my logins, otherwise I might have to chuck it so I'm not paying for too many services at once.
C'mon NBN. Fucking get your shit together...
