Hi All,
I am located in the Hills District of Sydney (Kellyville) and have recently switched from ADSL2 to NBN. NBN only became available in our area around three weeks ago and we were switched over last week Thursday.
With the Telstra supplied modem (tg99vac) we were able to connect and had OK speeds (~35 Mbs on the 100Mbps speed boost). Everything was working fine until Sunday afternoon where I attempted to connect my Asus DSL-AC68U to the Internet. Using the settings on the Whirlpool site, I was able to synch at a slightly faster speed than the tg99vac however the Asus wouldn't authenticate properly.
I pulled the plug from the Asus and put it back into the tg99vac and left it for a few minutes to try and reconnect. After about five minutes waiting, I tried again and no luck. I went to look at the modem and noticed that the WAN light was not lit, meaning the modem couldn't find a connection.
Over the next couple of hours I tried a combination of resetting the modem, different cables and ports, leaving it for longer and even switching back to the Asus. Nothing I did worked, and I still couldn't get the tg99vac to display a WAN light.
After a bit of Googling, I saw some people who had tried to use third party modems on Telstra NBN had managed to lock themselves out. The fix seemed to be to call Telstra technical support and tell them what happened so they could send out a technician to reactivate the port.
I gave Telstra technical support a call and after a brief run around ended up in their NBN section. The lady I spoke to there spent a while looking through my details and told me that the problem was that the my service was scheduled to go down for a period of 10 days (from 31 July to 9 August) for "upgrades". She said that it was nothing I did to disconnect myself, but it was always planned to go down for this period.
To me... this doesn't seem right. We've received absolutely no notice that our internet was going down for 10 days. I don't see why it would need to be disconnected at around 3pm on a Sunday afternoon for a 10 day upgrade. I don't undertand why the upgrade would have the working service offline for 10 days. I don't see why a service that has been installed within the last couple of weeks would even need an upgrade? And it seems extremely unlikely that we would be disconected exactly under the circumstances that other people have been locked out.
So my question for you all then - is this legitimate, or does she have no idea what she's talking about? Is there any other way I can confirm what she is saying? I can't find notification of any scheduled upgrades on the Telstra or NBN sites. I'm not sure who else I can talk to in order to find out what's going on? Disconnecting the service for ten days only four days after starting it seems like a crazy thing to do?
Thanks,
Brad