Telstra phone lines and ADSL (was Re: [H-GEN] Recommendations for a cheap internal modem which works with Linux and Windows)

[Sandra Milne]

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At 12:10 20/03/2003 +1000, you wrote:
>If you ring up Telstra and tell them that you want to move back from
>Optus local to a full-service Telstra phone service, and you have a home
>line, and you have previously had a Telstra line in your house, then
>Telstra are not charging you the $59 reconnection fee.  I know this, as
>I only recently (6 days ago) changed back to Telstra.

OK we did this. There is no fee for taking an Optus service that is on a 
Telstra line back to Telstra. However, this is not our situation. We are 
asking for our Telstra line to be connected (about a year after we got it 
disconnected).

What we were told was that if we had a dialtone (they told us that if the 
line hadn't been connected for a year they'd remove it from the exchange 
and the dialtone would be gone - I think this is a load of crap but we do 
still have a dialtone) it would cost us $59 to have the phone connected. We 
can't keep our Optus number as this belongs to Optus so Telstra will have 
to assign us a different phone number. That's fine, we'll probably just use 
the line as a fax line if we keep our Optus phone connected.

It works out to cost about $4-5 dollars a month more for line rental, and 
0.5c more per call. Well we don't make all that many calls so that's not a 
big deal. Plus we get the 15c neighbourhood calls.... I have no idea how 
this works and they didn't explain it to us.

We live across the street from the telephone exchange, so assuming it's 
ADSL enabled, we shouldn't have a problem with living too far away. This is 
mainly an Optus neighbourhood, so I'm hoping that the exchange isn't 
overloaded and thus has a spare ADSL line for us.

Unfortunately Telstra don't keep their new connections service open on 
weekends so we won't be connecting our Telstra line until Monday, but they 
can do it same day. On that day we shall be applying for iiNet internet. We 
already have an ADSL modem and we're hoping to have ADSL within 2 months.

If somebody is going to conduct a talk on ADSL setup and the ins and outs 
of tweaking your settings, we'd love to participate. We've had Optus cable 
for nearly 2 years and that was a case of plug it in and setup to contact 
dhcp server for an IP. I've heard that ADSL is somewhat more exotic in the 
settings, and although I know what PPPoE is, I've never used it.

thanks,

Sandra.
silne at optusnet.com.au 


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