I recently moved into an apartment, the previous tenants had fibre the whole building is wired for fibre, there's an ONT on the wall, and the previous tenants had a functioning connection. I naively assumed that this would enable the process to skip a few steps as clearly there's no consents required, and there's no physical installation required either.
I dutifully gathered the serial number off the ONT and provided that to my ISP, as they would need that detail to complete the process.
I was told that this would all take 5-30 days, which I thought was a ridiculously broad range.
After periodically following up with my ISP, it took two weeks for Chorus to even accept that the serial was valid - they had no record of it. I even provided its MAC address from a sticker on the back, but that didn't help. Eventually they worked out that the previous tenants had been connected via Vodafone, and decided that there really was a device there, but they couldn't move me over to it until the Vodafone connection was closed off. My ISP gave me a new connection ballpark of 10-15 days at this point, and advised that it would be another week before they could do anything as they had to wait for chorus to disconnect Vodafone and get things ready for them.
So I am 20 days in so far, and finally heard from Chorus directly today. They need to send someone to my place to ensure that the wiring and device are acceptable - the earliest this can be fit in is 2 weeks from now, after which they anticipate that it will be a further week before I can be connected.
If this timeline sticks, it will be 40 days from the initial request to having an internet connection at my new place.
This is in a place where:
- No consent was necessary as installation had already been completed
- No installation was necessary as it was already installed
- The ONT was known to be working at the time when the initial request was made (shortly before I moved in)
- I gave them the relevant information about the chorus-owned ONT at the start of the process to simplify the task
So my question is: is there anything humanly possible whenever anyone is getting fibre installed that can make the wait time even remotely acceptable? Because honestly I can't see what could possibly have been done to speed this up further and it's still taking almost 6 weeks.
Surely the experience can't be this bad for everyone?