Telephone Troubles

On 29 October I selected a company named Exetel to provide me with telephone and internet services.  Exetel relies on Telstra, the company that owns Australia's copper infrastructure, to provided the infrastructure support.

610 Phone Connection

Splice at Peak of Roof

Loose Line Blowing in Breeze

Exposed Connection at Pole

Split Conduit into Ground

Long Span to House

I was soon advised that my service was ready for use but when I checked out the phone service using two different telephones on three different telephone outlets I was getting no dial tone.  I could call my new number with my cell phone and all seemed normal except that the house phone was not ringing.  I could not make any calls with the house phone.

I notified Exetel and they did a line check and found no problem.  On 1 November I received a message from them to the effect that a request had been placed with their supplier (i.e. Telstra) to check the line.  A few days later I received a message from Exetel to check out my telephone service and on 7 November I reported to Exetel that Telstra had left a card stating that they had found no fault but that I still had no service.  I also reported that I was getting 0 voltage from the telephone jack, when a reading of 47-50V was normal.  On Friday 8 Nov I was told by Exetel that they would make an enquiry with Telstra to confirm that they had investigated the problem all of the way to the NBP.  NBP stands for "Network Boundary Point" and represents the point at which Telstra's responsibility ceases.  Exetel explained that in my case the NBP was where the incoming telephone line meets my house.

Over the weekend I went into the attic to see which was the first telephone jack in my daisy chain of 6 jacks spanning to the garage.  The first jack in the chain is in the dining room, so I took it apart.  The jack is an old fashioned but widely used 610 model and there were 2 white wires on post 2 and 2 blue wires on post 6.  A pair of black and red wires were not connected. Stephen and I did some research on the internet and the connection was legitimate, and represented a single line connection.  I then removed the white and blue wires, separated them, then probed every combination for voltage and found none.  My objective in separating the wires was to remove the jack from the rest of the daisy chain to keep things simple.

Today Brenda, Stephen, Shelley the Dog, and I drove to Darlington in order to have friends and neighbors (and Brenda's cousin) Bob and Jean Porter over for afternoon tea. I took my multimeter with me and checked the voltage at a joint in the attic about 2 meters from where the Telstra cable meets the house and got 0 voltage.  I telephoned Exetel and informed them of my finding, stating that there was no voltage reaching the house.

Stephen and I then did some research on the internet to determine the exact definition of a "Network Boundary Point" and found out that in the case of a stand-alone house such as mine it is either where the incoming cable meets the "Network Termination Device" (i.e. a junction box), and if there is no such junction box, then the NBP is the "first outlet connected to the lead in cable".  The incoming (i.e. lead-in) telstra cable meets my house at an ordinary wire splice rather than a Network Termination Device, which makes the NBP and therefore the scope of Telstra's responsibility my telephone jack in the dining room.

I telephoned Exetel with this information and was told that 'this changes everything'.  I stated that I was willing to engage a private contractor to check out the telephone wiring within my house, but if he reported that my house was OK and the problem lay in the Telstra infrastructure I would be extremely upset.  I also said that after looking over the situation I had no confidence that Telstra had in fact done a proper investigation of the problem.

Exetel will pursue Telstra and get back to me tomorrow.

I am publishing some photographs to show the sloppy connection setup that Telstra has provided.  First of all the telephone line is overhead instead of underground.  Then I find the span of the line much too long because instead of being connected to a pole in front of my house I am connected to a pole past the far corner of my property in front of the school.  The line makes a lazy loop into a junction box that looks poorly protected from the weather.  The line is loose and constantly moves back and forth in even a gentle breeze. It seems to me that this constant movement will fatigue the joints.

The line then runs down a conduit that is split at ground level and was patched up with tape that deteriorated long ago.

When I compare this sloppy setup with the neat work done within my house I'll put my be on the problem being on the Telstra side.

I'm still waiting to hear from the ex-property manager on whether or not the last tenants had a working telephone service.  They definitely had a land line number, but we are not sure if it was working for them.