I am a bit bemused at what is happening when moving from Telecom with Orcon for tolls and Internet to a Genius plan.  As far as I can see there is nothing on the Orcon website that explains that there may be a loss of phone service during this transition - if there is then I missed it.

I got a confirmation-of-order email fairly quickly, the Genius box arrived and a follow-up email saying the switch would be at 6pm tonight (14th).  This morning I got another email saying the service had been switched and to install the new box which was duly done.  In fact, because I had a Genius lite as a rented homehub I simply swapped the boxes over.  The new box lit up as expected, including the phone light.  Plugged in the phone and made the mistake of thinking that because I could hear a dial tone that the switch was complete.

Not so.  Dialing out (any number it seems) simply gets an Orcon recorded message to call the help desk.  At least the helpdesk call went through.  It seems that there could be a delay of up to 24 hours before the voice service is switched from Telecom to Orcon.  There was nothing in any email to explain this - the booklet that came with the new router simply says that if the phone light is on all is OK.

I understand that the voice switchover probably involves Telecom taking action of some sort and that Orcon would have no control over that - but I do think that this should have been explained in one of the 3 emails from Orcon so as to set expecxtations correctly.