Internet Knocked out by NBN Contractor?

So this morning I was using my internet and I'm on fibre to the node. To be fair it's normally great and experience very little downtime however this morning it went out randomly. Or so I thought. I noticed there was some sort of contractor working outside on connecting another house. When spoken to "Hey, were you working on connecting a house up the road"? He replied with a yes. I explained that my internet was now no longer working after that and he replied with "Too bad mate. Ring your service provider" I was almost certain it was something he had done so I said "Obviously then it's something you've done" Got another "Yeah, too bad, ring your service provider". I was almost taken back by this. He was driving a Toyota table top and I managed to get the rego but other than that no other details. Other than lodging it with my service provider how can I get action taken against this idiot who is surely going to get paid again to come and fix whatever he has just broken. He definitely got me pretty red hot this morning as I sit here using my mobile data to post this on the hold to Telstra.

Comments

  • Username checks out.

    • Hahah love it. Unfortunately on the other end of some fury today.

  • -4

    Should have gotten into a fight, the posted about that instead.

    • Unfortunately that's probably not my style. Sounds like I should of got you down here Drew.

      • +1

        You could have slashed one of his tyres and said you were looking for some pressurised air to fill your own up with before you went to work. Then tell him to call his service provider.

        They do this all the time, and they get paid to connect.
        - Too few connections on a riser? Pull out an existing and re-route it.
        - Where does that wire go, pull it real hard to see
        - Which way round did it go? Try this way, that looks alright
        - Is it that one or that one, (pull , pull, swap, yank) oh no it's this one over here, pull, pull yank

        Let alone all the genuine mistakes.

        Disconnections and yanked wires by multiple contractors don't come back to them, as the telcos do not contribute to a central faults service which names and shames the last tech to visit the point of each failure.

  • +3

    A similar thing happened to me quite a few years ago when I was on ADSL 2+ with iiNet. A contractor working in the pit between my house and my neighbour's house took out my internet connection while getting my neighbour connected. We were watching him as our connection went down. He also told me to contact our ISP as there was nothing he could do. We had to lodge the incident with iiNet, who then contacted Telstra who sent out one of their contractors (not this same dingbat, thankfully). I was offline for quite a number of days. As you can imagine, I, too, was angry and frustrated as there was no other recourse for me but to follow the chain of command. You can try to get a discount for the days that you're offline.

    Also, as uk3000 suggests, definitely report it to NBN.

  • +6

    From how you described it, it does look like he disconnected it on purpose. Contact NBN, tell them your story and attach the rego pic:

    https://www2.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/contact-us-f…

    • +2

      Thanks very much. I've just gone and done that now! Will be interested to see their response.

      • +2

        nbn won't care. They will just send someone to fix your problem. Some techie is going to pocket some extra money. NBN is government owned, and funded by government, it's government's money.

        One thing you could do, is to file a complaint to whichever body licensing the technician, and hopefully have their license ripped.

        • They might care if you refuse to pay for the time this month that it was unavailable due to the outage.

        • +3

          NBN goes through resellers so they don't care.

  • -3

    Haven't Telstra advised of a general outage for customers connected via NBN this morning and that services are being gradually restored?
    You may have jumped the gun here accusing the NBN tech…

  • I think twitter and facebook is your friend. And remember to #tag media, i think they like controversy.

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