Telstra’s fun and games with pair gain and RIMs are great for entertainment. Unless you’re the one who has to wait weeks for internet access, I guess.
My grandmother wants to get in on this whole internet thing, so I bought her a second-hand Dell box with a 19″ monitor (she can’t see very well), showed her how to use the mouse (nope, it doesn’t work if you hold it in the air vertically…) and applied to have ADSL put on. Sure we could have just gone for dialup but I figure that it’s not going to help a new user who is very unsure of what they’re doing if they click things and then have to wait for long periods of time before something happens. Better to spend just a little bit more and get faster feedback, so there’s less confusion.
Anyway the short story is that she lives in a newish development, maybe ten years old, and Telstra in their wisdom used pair gain to help save the copper trees. So we’ve had to wait about two weeks, which isn’t bad because they said it’d be eight, for the guys to come out and hook things up properly.
Well, for some values of “properly”. They managed to bungle things a little bit, leaving my Grandma’s next-door neighbour with my Grandma’s phone number (the neighbour’s number disappeared into the ether) and my Grandma had a totally dead phone line! Heh, woops! Apparently my Mum took control of the situation and her gentle persuasion must have worked, to my surprise: a guy was out at 7pm fixing up the situation. Now it’s all sorted. It’s not a good idea for an elderly lady of ill health to be in a house with no phone.
So now we just have to wait for the ADSL modem paraphernalia to arrive and Grandma will be screaming down the information superhighway with the rest of us.