Now that the Casa de Cowboy rebuild is almost done, it's time to get the fibre hooked up to replace the increasingly outage-prone VDSL. When we started the build we buried the appropriate green Chorus conduit from the phone plinth where the utilities enter our/our neighbours' property down to the house. It's a straightforward install, pull fibre through the conduit, hook it up, and connect it via the ETP to the pre-laid fibre running into the house.

 

 

Except that Chorus brought in the fibre from the street at the opposite end of the property from where the phone lines and other utilities come in. To get it to anywhere useful would mean going through a concrete slab, concrete fence foundation, masses of large tree roots, retaining wall, more tree roots, concrete base of a second retaining wall, brick footpath, more tree roots, concrete base of third retaining wall, and a brick patio with cement-reinforced gravel base (the Casa is on a steep section so the only feasible access for utilities is exactly where everything currently runs, under the driveway). If you wanted to deliberately locate it at the worst possible location for access to the house then Chorus have managed to find it.

 

 

Currently waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for a callback from Chorus to get them to bring the fibre in from the street where the phone lines come in. Argh. We went out of our way to make it as failure-proof as possible by doing almost everything for them, and despite all that they still managed to engineer in the fail.