After many almost trouble-free years of ADSL service from aaNet they decided to shut up shop due to their customers moving to NBN, which we can't get here, and so I decided to give Telstra a go again.
Customer service assured me activation of my ADSL service would be on Dec.31, of course it wasn't as the modem hadn't arrived by then, but it went ahead on Wed. January 8.
The LTE backup came online around midday, and I was pleasantly surprised to see 4-5Mbps on the test app, as I had been pushing to get 3-4Mbps on the old ADSL
Shortly after the ADSL came online, and I saw an amazing 10Mbps download - all good!
The next day (Thu) I started setting up some of our services. Web servers on, email, etc. Changing smtp host to smtp.telstra.com required authentication, and I called support to find which to use. Turned out it was my new user.name@bigpond.com Telstra email, so what is my password? "Don't worry, I'll change it for you", and she set a password and read it out to me. I entered it in my postfix config, and voila, outbound mail was working!
And then the problems started - the ADSL PPP connection dropped, and the logs showed CHAP Authentication errors.
We added the new password to the PPP settings - still Auth failures. Support changed the password, we tried again - still no go. And again, still no...
They went away to consult, and came back saying there was a glitch in their system - try again in an hour. No go. Now, they say it is provisioning, we need to talk to the provisioning team.
All the rest of Thursday, and Friday, taken on this, with no progress. Then, "provisioning is away for the weekend, it will be fixed first thing Monday."
Of course, it wasn't.
I called support again, now "provisioning will take 3-5 business days". And to make it worse, the 4G/LTE link then stopped working, and the support chap looked it up and said "it is showing an outage in your area, resolution should be by the 19th"
What?? A whole week and no connection?
Anyway, back to my question - if I had a working ADSL link for a day and a half, which only dropped out when Telstra support changed my PPP password, can it really be "provisioning", or is something else going on, which needs another fix?
BTW I found the first level support quite helpful. I was talking to a lovely girl in India who assured me the air over there was worse then here with our bushfires, that they actually have shops where you can go and buy air so you can breathe! She was quite candid, telling me Telstra was pretty terrible, their equipment was always breaking down, and she had to support businesses who had been without internet service for months.
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