Telstra complaints: told it is your wiring, when the fault is in the network

“Telstra said it’s my internal wiring, but the fault was in their network”

We hear that sentence a lot, and have for years. A customer reports a fault. They are told it is in the wiring inside their home. They pay a private technician to look. The private technician finds the home’s wiring is fine and the fault is in the network.

Now the customer has a fault that is still there and an invoice for finding out it was never theirs. Then comes the hard part: persuading the provider to send a network technician after all. If the fault has cleared by the time that technician arrives, because the cables dried out after rain, the customer can be charged a fee for a call-out that found nothing.

The loop, and the way out of it

1234

1. You report the fault
2. You’re told it’s your wiring
3. Checked inside: nothing found
4. Back to the provider

And round again: by the time anyone looks, the fault may have cleared.

The way out, at step 2 Have the line tested where it arrives at your property, and get the result in writing. What to do, step by step

• 56.2%We proved the fault was not in the customer’s cabling.182 of 324 cases
• 36.4%The customer had already been told the fault was on their side before we attended.118 of 324 cases

Those two figures are from the study of our own filmed fault jobs.

This post explains how that happens. It was first written in 2017 about Telstra’s phone and ADSL network. The copper it describes is still in the ground and still carries internet to a great many homes, so it has been brought up to date. If you need the question settled now, an independent NBN technician tests which side the fault is on.

First, who owns the network now?

When this was first written, Telstra owned the copper network and every other provider’s phone and ADSL service ran over it.

That has changed. NBN is now the wholesaler for internet in most of Australia, and Telstra is one retailer among many. But on fibre to the node and fibre to the curb, NBN’s service still finishes on the copper Telstra built. The pits, the joints and the lead-in cable to your house are the same ones. So are their faults.

Whoever your provider is, a network fault is reported to them, and they pass it to the network owner. If it is a home phone rather than the internet, it is the same copper, and phone line repair covers that side.

Why faults in the network get called internal wiring

There is no single reason. From years working on both sides of the boundary, these are the ones we see. (Who tests which part of the line is set out in what an internet technician is.)

• The fault was diagnosed without a visit. A remote test said the line looked normal, so the cause was assumed to be inside the home.
• The test stopped short of the house. A line can be tested from the joint in the street and pass, while the fault is in the lead-in between that joint and the house.
• The fault was not there on the day. Faults that depend on water and heat come and go.
• The network is old. Much of the copper has been in the ground for decades.

Lead-in cables and how a line gets tested

The lead-in is the cable from the pit or the pole in the street to your house. Some have been in the ground for fifty or sixty years, and they are a common place for faults. Where the lead-in is on your side to replace, a new lead-in cable is the fix.

A network technician closes a fault by getting a passing result from an automated line test. That test can be run from the joint in the street, or from the end of the lead-in at the house: the first socket in a home, or the network side of the frame in a building.

Where it is run from matters. A test from the street joint says nothing about the lead-in. A test from the first socket covers the whole network side. If nobody was home, or nobody went inside, the lead-in may never have been tested at all.

A line can pass a test at the pit and still be faulty at the house. The lead-in is the part in between.

The CAN 2000 project and the gel joints

In the late 1990s, after Telstra was privatised, the customer access network had a major overhaul, done largely by contracting companies. I worked for one of them and supervised about ten contractor teams across Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Central Coast. We replaced old asbestos pits with PVC ones, replaced deteriorating network and lead-in cables, and encapsulated the new joints.

Encapsulation was meant to keep water out. Once a joint was rebuilt, two chemicals were mixed and poured in, and they set into a gel around every wire in the joint.

It did not last. Anyone who later had to get into the joint had to dig through the gel, and most removed only as much as they needed and sealed it again. In the Australian heat the gel broke down into a milky liquid, and that attacked the insulation on the wires.

The result is a fault the trade calls foreign battery: voltage leaking onto a pair of wires from the pairs beside it. A line with that fault will not pass the test, and the only clean pairs may be somewhere else in the same damaged joint.

Bag joints and cutting under

A technician facing a gel-affected joint had two choices. One was to report the joint for proper repair, which took time and did not get that customer working that day. The other was to cut the cable under the joint and join the customer’s pair there, bypassing the gel.

Cutting under restores the service. It also leaves a new joint with no proper enclosure. It gets wrapped in a plastic bag and tape, which is why it is called a bag joint. The bags are not waterproof.

The pits were built to drain. Over the years silt has blocked a lot of them, so they fill when it rains, and the bag joints sit under water. Many of those joints are still in service.

When I contracted on that work, a fault was paid as one job however long it took, and a fault that came back within a couple of weeks counted against the technician who closed it. I mention it because it explains the choices people made at the pit. It is not a comment on the people.

Why these faults come and go

Water and heat. A wet joint fails when the pit floods and comes good as it dries. A gel-affected joint gets worse on hot days. By the time a technician arrives, sometimes a week or two later, the line may test perfectly.

That is how a real network fault ends up recorded as “no fault found” or “internal wiring”. It is also why a dropout that comes and goes is so hard to get fixed, and why tracing a fault on the day it shows matters. There is more on the weather side of it in does weather affect your internet.

What to do if you are told it is your wiring

1. 1

   Ask how they know

   Was anyone at the property? Where was the line tested from? Ask for the result in writing, and get a reference number.

2. 2

   Rule out the simple things

   Unplug everything from the phone sockets except the modem. Plug the modem into the first socket, with a new lead and no adaptor.

3. 3

   Keep a log

   Write down when it drops and what the weather was doing. A pattern of faults after rain is evidence of a network fault.

4. 4

   Have the line tested at the boundary

   An independent registered cabler can test the line where it arrives at your property, with your wiring disconnected. That one test says which side the fault is on.

5. 5

   Take the result back

   If the fault is on the network side, give your provider the written result and ask for the fault to be re-opened.

That boundary test is what an internet technician does. We test to the boundary and not inside the network, because the network is not ours. Where the fault is yours, it is fixed on the day. Where it is not, you get the finding in writing.

We looked at how often the “internal wiring” call holds up across our own filmed jobs. The results are in our study of NBN faults and internal wiring.

How to make a complaint

1. Complain to the provider first. Telstra has a complaints page on its website, and so does every other provider. Give dates, what you were told, and your evidence. Get a reference number.
2. Give them a fair chance to fix it.
3. Then go to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO). It is free, and providers must respond to it.

These are the short version; the full steps for any provider, from the first complaint to the TIO, are in our complaint guide.

A complaint that says “my internet is bad” goes nowhere. A complaint that says “the line was tested at the boundary on this date, here is the result, and the fault is on the network side” gets read.