Our area was supposed to be getting NBN for a while now. We are in the Dapto second area to be turned on.
I was checking nbnco everyday to see if we were enabled and one day, instead of a “Building” I got an error on the site. I took this to be a good sign and ordered the NBN connection with Exetel.
That was the 2nd July 2014. I was told 30 days for the order to happen.
On the 28th July, I chased them as I hadn’t heard anything and was told “We are still waiting for an install time”. About 30 mins later I received my appointment for the 28th August. I presume they forgot to place the order with NBNco.
The first visit (20th August 2014) was interesting as I had no draw cable in the conduit. As we had a 30pr cable already running to the house, I disconnected it from the krone MDF and attached a rope to it. From the pit, we then pulled and it was quite easy to get the cable out and the ripe in. Once this was done, we just attached the fiber, the 30pr and a new rope to the end and pulled that all back in.
The fiber provided consisted of a roll about 100m long, with a screw plug on one end (this screws into the multiport) and no termination on the other end. They just measured it out and picked the best length from the truck. The pit with the multiport was just up from my house. There’s another pit just out the front of my house but it had no multiport in it. The problem is that the two are not connected directly. So, the fiber had to run under the road to another pit on the other side, then back from that one to the one out the front of my house.
So, after all this, the fiber was left hanging out of the ground conduit on the wall of my house with some tape on it. About 10m slack was coiled up.
On the 24th, The second time I got a call with the “We are here to install” I headed home again to make sure it was all ok. They turned up, complained that the first people didn’t finish properly, and put the Fiber box on the wall and plugged the service into the multiport (the box in the street that services about 4 houses). The cable was then looped into the box but not stripped down the single fiber.
25th July, I emailled exetel and requested they send the config details so I could setup the router at home. After reading a few forums I decided an Airport Extreme (APE 6th gen) would be best and when they replied (a few hours later) I had all the username and password for the PPPoE connection. I configured the APE and just had it ready to plug in.
On the 27th, I got another call and they wanted to come out and do the install. My wife was home so I didn’t attend but he just stripped the cable and put a plug on the end of the fiber in the outside box.
On the 28th, The “proper” appointment day, I took the morning off work so I would be there for the 8am – 12pm install window. At 11:30 I got a call (they were always good at calling first) to say he was late so I went to work. At 1:30pm, I got another call to let me know they were on their way so I headed home and was there just after they arrived.
The installers then had to remove the external box to put a new hole through the wall. there was already a service conduit for other cables but they wanted their own one. This done, the external box went back on, a patch lead passed through the hole and the inside work started.
It was easily mounted. Firstly there’s the power supply box, this takes 240v, has a battery inside and has an output lead ready for the network termination unit (NTU) or device (NTD) depending on who you talk to. Installing the NTU was also easy as I had power and cat6 cables there ready. Power was applied and the box lit up (as well as the powersupply lights).
The outside technician had an optical power meter that he used plugged in to both the internal and external connections. Normal loss is 15-20db apparently and I had 18 so that seems ok. Once this was done, he just butted them together inside the box and sealed it up and took photos.
Back to inside, They waited for the lights to be happy then he took some photos and had me sign the ipad to say its installed ok. It was then “activated” on the ipad and within about 3 mins, I was allowed to plug in the APE to one of the ports. I then connected my phone to the APE and did some basic tests. 50mbps down and 39 up so it was clearly working.
After some reconfiguration work on my home network I now have it all working. Part of this was to remove the two ADSL connections we had. So, after turning on at about 2pm, getting it running on the whole house by about 3pm, everything looked lovely. This morning I checked the exetel site and apparently have uploaded 25,767.14 MB and downloaded 35,354.15 MB till midnight last night. This will slow a lot once all the syncing and software updates are finished
