Internet technician in Penrith, for fibre, granny flats and the NBN box in the wrong room.

Sound familiar?

Around Penrith, the fibre’s arrived. What happens after the box?

Fibre to the premises is more than half of the Penrith connections we know, 20 of 35, more than in any other area.

So the box, the cabling after it and the wifi get tested first. We're independent of the provider and NBN; your side gets fixed where it can be, and the rest goes in writing.

1. Plug a laptop straight into the router with a cable. Run a speed test while the problem is happening. Fast on the cable and slow on wifi: it is the wifi, and the WiFi Technician page is the one you want. Slow, or dropping out, on the cable too: keep reading, it is the connection.
2. Look at the lights on the box on the wall. The NBN box, sometimes called the NTD, tells you which part of the connection is alive. Only the power light on is not a wiring problem in the house. What the lights on the NBN box mean explains each one.
3. Reset the box and the router properly, once. Hold the reset on the box until every light flashes, then let it come back. Router off for thirty seconds, then on; if it was ever factory reset, it needs its settings put back before it will connect.
4. Ask next door. If the neighbours are down too, it is the street, not your house, and nothing inside will fix it. Ring your provider and wait for them.
5. If your provider says it is your wiring, ask for that in writing. Then ring us. If our testing shows the fault is not in your house, the full escalation report is what you send them.
6. In a unit, ask your provider for your cable pair details first. They save an hour at the MDF, the frame in the basement where the street cables meet the building’s, and they tell us which pair is yours.
7. If an NBN technician is already booked, let them come first. They test to the boundary at no charge. If they say it is not theirs, that is when to book us.

Recognise it?

Dropping, slow, out of reach, or in the wrong room: Penrith faults

The usual suspects

After the fibre arrives: what goes wrong around Penrith

We hear from Penrith less than from anywhere else on our list, so this says only what the calls support. Most of it is about what happens after the fibre arrives.

• Where the box was put.

  A box left by the garage door or in a back bedroom, far from where people work.

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  Shifting the NBN box came up in 9 of the 61 Penrith enquiries. Wherever the box sits, the modem and the wifi sit too. It’s shifted, or a cable takes the connection to the right room, quoted from photos.

• The run past the NBN box.

  On fibre, the wiring past the box belongs to the house, and it fails like any cable.

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  Twenty of the 35 Penrith connections in our records are fibre to the premises. Past the box, any lead or run to the modem or another room is the property’s, and a damaged run or a poor socket there cuts the connection while the fibre carries on. Each is tested on its own.

• An extender in the chain.

  A plug-in extender: when its link to the main unit fails, everything on it fails too.

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  In the Castlereagh call, an office in a granny flat had a wifi extender that wouldn’t hold, and the drop-outs started after months of working. An extender is a weak link for a separate building; a cable or a proper access point is the lasting fix.

• No cable from the street.

  A house with no NBN cable from the street at all, like the Glenmore Park rental.

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  The lead-in is level top of the Penrith list, 11 of 61. In Glenmore Park in 2020 a rented house had no NBN cable from the street at all. Whether a conduit already reaches the house decides how the cable goes in, and it’s quoted first.

• A business on fibre to the building.

  In an office or clinic building, calls dropping and workstations losing the internet.

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  Seven of the 50 Penrith properties in our records are businesses. In the St Marys call a medical centre on fibre to the building had phone calls dropping mid-conversation and the internet in and out across its workstations. In a building, the frame, the run to the suite and the office’s own cabling all need testing.

• The flat out the back.

  A granny flat that relies on wifi across the yard, or has nothing.

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  Granny flats come up in 13 of the 50 Penrith enquiries with a known property. A wifi signal crossing the yard is easily lost; a cable between the buildings, through conduit if there is one, is steadier.

• The modem.

  A modem that's old, misconfigured or shut in a cupboard, behind a perfectly good fibre box.

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  Of the Penrith calls where a side was recorded, three blamed the equipment. On fibre, putting a laptop on the NBN box by cable separates a good line from a bad modem, as the St Clair job below shows on HFC.

• Old copper where it’s still in use.

  On the handful of copper services here, old sockets and joints on the line.

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  Eight of the 35 Penrith connections are copper services, fibre to the curb or the node, and 4 were still on ADSL when they rang. On those, extensions left on the copper and tired joints are the likely causes, found with everything but one socket disconnected.

How it works

From the box outward: a Penrith visit in four steps

The visit closes with a written answer. Testing reaches the network boundary and goes no further: beyond it the network is NBN’s, and we’re on your side of the line. For the fibre to the premises connections that make up most of our Penrith records, the boundary is the NBN box itself.

1. 1
   

   Start at the NBN box.

   Its lights first, then a wired laptop plugged directly in. Full speed there means the fibre has done its job.

2. 2
   

   Work outward through the house.

   The cable to the modem, the modem itself, then any run to another room or the flat, each tested with the next one disconnected.

3. 3
   

   Map where the signal fails.

   If the connection is good on a cable, the wifi is measured room by room, extender and all, until the weak point shows.

4. 4
   

   Fix it, quote it, or report it.

   Faults in the house are put right while we're there, time permitting. Bigger jobs are quoted, and network faults are written up.

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   A lead replaced, the modem set up or moved, an extender taken out, while we're there if the first hour reaches; shifting the box or a new cable run is quoted. A fault in the box itself is written up for your provider. We can't make anyone fix their side, but if you want us with you all the way, we do everything in our power to get you a result. The full escalation report, with photos and video, is there if you need it.

A real job from the field

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St Clair, NSW · HFC · Filmed on site, 8 min

Dropping in and out on HFC. The isolator was loose, and the router was the fault.

An HFC house in St Clair kept losing its internet, and calls to the provider hadn't fixed it. Once the NBN device was reset, a laptop plugged into it got full speed, and the isolator outside was only half screwed on. With a new cable and no SIM, the router still failed: it was the router.

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St Clair, a house on HFC. The internet kept going on and off, and several calls to the provider hadn’t sorted it.

On arrival there was nothing even with a laptop plugged straight into the NBN connection device. After a factory reset of that device, the laptop got about 52 down and 20 up, so the service was reaching the house. Outside, the isolator was only half screwed on; done up properly, it tested good.

Through the modem router, on its WAN cable, the internet came and went. The router showed its lights as though it was online, and wifi and a wired laptop both connected with no internet. The SIM card came out of the router, since some keep falling back to it, and the WAN cable was swapped for a brand new one. Nothing changed, and a factory reset of the router didn’t help either.

A laptop straight into the NBN device again: internet, at the speed on the plan. So the device, the cable and everything up to the router were fine, and the router was the fault. That finding went to the provider, with the need for a new router.