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 16:50 25/03/2003 +1000, you wrote:
>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.

No we didn't take our Telstra phone number to Optus. I think that appears 
to be the major difference here. We had a Telstra line *AND* an Optus line 
for a few months until we decided that paying huge fees for a phone service 
we weren't using was just stupid and disconnected the Telstra line, keeping 
our (at the time) free Optus line.

>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.

We just got a Telstra line connected today, and the monkey at Telstra told 
us that the exchange it's on is ADSL enabled.

>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.

Some friends of ours got it connected in St Lucia last Nov/Dec and they 
love it. They're power users so we trust their judgement in this matter. :-)

>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.

It's an ex-Telstra Alcatel doover. Approximately 2 years old. It used to be 
employed as an ADSL modem in my brother's flat in Mount Isa. We hope it 
still works :-) It hasn't taken out our power supply the one time we 
plugged it into power and fired it up, so we're assuming it's still good. 
It had somewhat questionable storage with a 'friend' of my brother.

Anyway, we'll be applying for ADSL with iinet in the next little while. 
Anything to get off Optus. I am so sick of being able to browse the web 
faster at work on our 256k Frame Relay connection than I can on my 
(supposed) 10Mbps cable connection at home.

Sandra.
silne at optusnet.com.au 


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