90 day wait for ADSL connection!

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Skolink

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#57377 11-Feb-2010 14:21

What 3rd world service from Telecom! My friend who has just moved into a house in Northwood Christchurch cannot get a broadband connection as there is no spare capacity in the exchange. This is a new subdivision only a few years old, and they didn't even allow enough capacity for every house to be connected. You have to go on a waiting list, and get connected when other people disconnect, apparently there is about a 90 day wait!!
Another example of pathetic underinvestment and lack of planning from Telecom.

johnr

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#297959 11-Feb-2010 14:37

90 days is a short wait I know people that are on a 12 month+ waiting list

Ragnor

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#297965 11-Feb-2010 14:51

You friend is unlucky and life isn't fair.

Skolink

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#297989 11-Feb-2010 15:41

You guys don't seem particularly surpised, but I'd never heard of such a situation before, esp in a 'planned' suburb. When the local Telstra CBD exchange didn't have capacity for my previous work when we shifted, they went and installed more equipment to expand the capacity which only took a couple of weeks.
The kind of response I was hoping for were
-suggestions for decent alternatives (not 3G etc)
-more background info into why that situation exists there (developer's fault?)
-direction to the appropriate place to get something done about it (TUANZ?)

Cymro

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#297991 11-Feb-2010 15:44

Skolink: What 3rd world service from Telecom! My friend who has just moved into a house in Northwood Christchurch cannot get a broadband connection as there is no spare capacity in the exchange. This is a new subdivision only a few years old, and they didn't even allow enough capacity for every house to be connected. You have to go on a waiting list, and get connected when other people disconnect, apparently there is about a 90 day wait!!
Another example of pathetic underinvestment and lack of planning from Telecom.

Making an educated guess that the Northwood subdivision is served off the Belfast exchange, that exchange was upgraded to ADSL2 back in 2007, probably before they went and built a whole load more houses?

6 new cabinets scheduled for April 2010 in that Exchange area incidentally, which gives you roughly 90 days for the cutovers and freeing up ports at the Exchange (or going straight on a cabinet if they are in range) to happen.

Not exactly third world now is it?

wongtop

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#297995 11-Feb-2010 15:56

- http://www.compass.net.nz/resi...
- no ports left at the exchange
- wait??

Skolink

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#298013 11-Feb-2010 16:30

This is a cool tool to see where and when you might be upgraded. http://www.telecomwholesale.co...
Thanks for the suggestion wong, I'll pass it on.

Dyson

Shop now for Dyson appliances (affiliate link).

Ragnor

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#298032 11-Feb-2010 17:25

Telecom is about half way through a 4 year plan where they are spending a truckload of money installing cabinets everywhere to meet the goal of 80% of the population having 10Mbit sync speed.

It's something like 25 new cabinets per week, each cabinet serving a max of 500 connections with each cabinet costing around $150,000. Another interesting stat is that they are spending around $3 million dollars per day on intrastructure in 2009 and 2010

From what the other poster mentioned that area is due to get cabinets pretty soon.

That your friend can't get connected right now really is unlucky.

NonprayingMantis

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#298314 12-Feb-2010 12:07

Skolink: What 3rd world service from Telecom! My friend who has just moved into a house in Northwood Christchurch cannot get a broadband connection as there is no spare capacity in the exchange. This is a new subdivision only a few years old, and they didn't even allow enough capacity for every house to be connected. You have to go on a waiting list, and get connected when other people disconnect, apparently there is about a 90 day wait!!
Another example of pathetic underinvestment and lack of planning from Telecom.

If waiting 3 months for a DSL connection to be provisioned because too many of your neighbours are using broadband is a typical situation in the third world, then the plight of people there has been grossly exaggerated by all those world vision adverts.

Incidentally anyone know how much it costs telecom to add ports to an exchange?

cbrpilot

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Spark NZ

#298533 13-Feb-2010 00:26

It's not the extra ports that are the cost.
This sort of problem tends not to be an exchange level issue (never say never though!).
Mostly it's a cabinet issue.

So if a cabinet is full, what do you do?
Add more port - cabinet may be too small, and they've have to replace the cabinet. For larger areas this is probably not an issue and will fit into the cabinetisation schedule somewhere. Some areas they may be able to get around pretty rebuilding the cabinet from the inside out, changing the wiring to make more room. Remember most of the cabinets out there were designed and built before Broadband was invented - when all they had to fit inside was equipment for PSTN interconnection.

For smaller areas, this becomes much more of a challenge. Even if there is sufficient room inside the cabinet, backhaul may become an issue. If they have to provide more backhaul this takes time, and in many cases this is where the business case for adding more equipment to the cabinet falls over.

My views are my own, and may not necessarily represent those of my employer.