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

Hilton Travis Hilton at QuarkAV.com
Tue Mar 25 01:50:58 EST 2003


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Hi Sandra,

On Sat, 2003-03-22 at 18:18, Sandra Milne wrote:
> 
> 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).

That is the exact same situation I had.  I had previously taken my
Telstra landline and cable modem service over to Optus.  Optus installed
their own box, and tails from there into the house.  The Telstra line
was disconnected and the ptus line used in its place.  I had no dialtone
on the Telstra outlet.  This happened over 18 months ago.

> 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.

You seem to have spoken to a regular monkey at Telstra.  Did you take
your original Telstra number to Optus?  I did, and when I asked Telstra
to take it back, they did so.  When I originally spoke to the lovely
lass at Telstra, she said that they were happily receiving "WinBack"
customers, and reconnecting them at no charge - IF they had previously
had a Telstra landline connected at that premises.

> 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.

Neighborhood calls are calls on the same exchange.

> 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, nothing is a given with Telstra.  You can check your
phone number for ADSL availability, but until it is actually
provisioned, you don't know if the check gave a true result.

> 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.

Sounds good.  But, check with someone else in at Telstra about the
connection issue.

I'm looking at becoming a VISP and reselling ADSL myself to the
residential users I know - working for yourself, every little bit
helps.  :)  Sorted in the next week or so, I'd say.  I do know some
people on iiNet, and aside from one person in Macgregor who has been
offline for the past week, the rest seem to be relatively happy with
their service.

> 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.

PPPOE - Point to Point Tunneling Protocol Over Ethernet - works over an
Ethernet connection (from the modem/router to your computer) in a very
similar way that PPP works over a serial connection from your analog
modem to your computer.  Roaring Penguin's RP-PPPOE software
(http://www.roaringpenguin.com/pppoe/) is the most common Linux-based
PPPOE software used.  Depends on the ADSL modem/router you have, you may
not even need to configure PPPOE on your Linux box - the modem may take
care of all of this for you, and you just connect to it as to any other
Ethernet device.

-- 

Regards,

Hilton Travis                   Email: Hilton at QuarkAV.com
Manager                         Phone: +61-(0)7-3343-3889
Quark AudioVisual               Phone: +61-(0)419-792-394
Quark Computers
(Brisbane, Australia)            http://www.QuarkAV.com/

Non Linear Video Editing Solutions & Digital Audio Workstations
 Network Administration, SmoothWall Firewalls, NOD32 AntiVirus
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War doesn't determine who is right.  War determines who is left.


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