Hey intelligent people,

I am moving shortly, I'm currently with netspace but I want to combine my mobile, home phone and cable/ADSL all in one and get 6 months free etc...
I rang Optus to get signed up but they say it cannot be done as the line has been split. Can't even get ADSL. Even though their website said I could.

Little confused, I rang Telstra, they CAN give me cable AND ADSL???
What the??

Can anyone explain?

there are telstra cable and lines in the area and no optus ones

jabroney is wrong. also either telstra or optus is wrong

I was under the impression that other ISP's use Telstra's lines?

because you touch yourself at night

optus uses their own cable lines, I'm guessing telstra can cheat when it comes to DSL or something but I doubt it. You're probably stuck with telstra cable

I have the similar problem at my house, I have TLS cable but I can't get Optus cable. I remember it is something to do with the case of either having overhead lines and inground lines, where only Telstra has access to the above/in ground lines and Optus can only use above ground lines. Although I could be wrong.

the optus cable is above ground, it is the lowest single back cable on the ye old power poles..

check out the front of the new house and see if it is there..

Optus use Telstra Phone lines for ADSL, but they use their own Coax for Optus Vision / Cable Internet.

I am in nearly the exact same position as you, I have a RIM on my phone lines (Fibre from exchange to a big box near my estate then coax to my house) and underground phone lines, so no optus cabling.

It sucks, but you learn to live with Telstra Cable, its not TOOO bad. Telsta should be able to at least search for another coax line running past your house and swap you onto it, but you dont know until you apply for ADSL and get rejected.

Oh poor you, only able to get cable internet, must be hard.

ya khel, its hard to live with that 30 ping when you are playing online

ya khel, its hard to live with that 30 ping when you are playing online

Previous posters have been right in saying the reason you may not be able to get optus cable but can get telstra goes back to when they first rolled out their cable networks. Basically, optus and telstra both decided to roll out their networks a few suburbs at a time, each starting in different suburbs. Of course, neither telstra or optus completed rolling out their cable networks before they realised that adsl was a much cheaper way of delivering broadband to (almost) all their customers. As a result they both stopped rolling out their cable networks before they had finished.

This leaves us with a patchy cable network, with some areas serviced by both telstra and optus cable, some serviced by either telstra or optus and some areas serviced by neither. Presumably if you can only get telstra cable, you are in an area that only telstra ever got round to cabling. In these areas, optus only deliver broadband via adsl over telstra phone lines.

As for why you cant get adsl, you are the victim of telstra's penny pinching.
To make sure you are aware how a telephone system works, here is a simple description. In it's simplest form a telephone system has each house wired exclusively to an exchange, that is located in some central location, with a copper wire that is only used when you are making a call (or on the internet). This is what you pay line rental for. (Incidentally the reason line rental is a flat fee is that the line can only be used to provide you with services, and telstra cannot use it to provide any services to (and thus bill) any other subscriber, so you pay for an entire months usage of that line whether you actually use it or not.) The exchanges are connected to each other by way of trunk lines (usually fibre) which can be used by any of the people connected to the exchange when they want to place a call to another exchange. You only pay for the time you are actually using these trunks (eg std) because when you are not using them, other subscribers can use them (that is telstra can make money off them).

Basically, when a new housing estate is built, it usually needs a whole new telephone exchange to connect all the new houses to. This exchange needs to be installed in a building, namely the exchange building. Of course, building a new building to house a new exchange is expensive, and when a lot of the old exchange buildings are very large (because they used to have operators and stuff working there) and have a lot of spare space, telstra tends to install the new exchange for the new houses into spare space in an existing building. (For example, the exchange near where I live has at least four exchanges in it, the 3279 exchange, the 3376 exchange, the 3715 exchange and I think the 3714 exchange).

This creates the problem that all the new houses might be a long way from their exchange (this in itself could prevent you getting adsl), which means that a very large amount of copper wire would be needed to connect each house to the exchange directly. Since the point of putting the exchange in the existing building was to save money, telstra also has a few tricks for reducing the amount of copper wire needed to connect a group of houses to a geographically distant exchange.

Pair Gaining.
The oldest, simplest one is pair gaining. You know that a single telephone wire has much more bandwidth than is required for a single conversation. This is how adsl works, by using some of the spare bandwidth for adsl. Broadly speaking, what telstra have done on some phone lines is instead of letting you use the adsl bandwidth for whatever digital data you like (ie broadband internet), they have used it to send a digitised version of someone elses voice connection. The result of this is neither you nor the other person can get adsl.

RIM
The other thing telstra do is to install a device called a RIM close to the new houses. A RIM is basically part of the exchange and can be connected back to the rest of the exchange via a fibre trunk which proves cheaper than a bundle of copper. The problem is that the digital adsl data is in a seperate bit of the bandwidth to the voice, and the RIMs that telstra uses don't know anything about this part of the signal and so just ignore it. This stops the exchange from ever knowing it was there in the first place. However, I think that telstra are in the process of installing new RIMs that do know about adsl, so this will not be a problem for too much longer.

As for why can telstra give you adsl? Well, your house is probably currently on a pair gained line, and telstra will not change that just so optus can provide adsl to you. But if you want telstra adsl, perhaps there are enough spare slots that the poor sod you have been pair gained with can be shifted onto someone elses line, leaving the line free for you to have adsl. After all, it is their line. On the other hand, when I got telstra adsl, I was told "YES! Telstra can supply your house with adsl!" But was then told a bit later in the same call that the self install kit would not be sent until a linesman had set up the exchange end of the link because sometimes it was not possible to connect houses they thought they could connect (for reasons of pair gaining and such).

Sometimes, I think, when telstra tell you that you can get ADSL, they really mean, you are in an adsl coverage area, and thus might be able to get adsl. But this is conjecture.

last edited by hUON at 16:08:26 30/Aug/05

*brain explodes*

two tin cans and a piece of string ftw

Yeah, I think I'm on a RIM, because every time I go to sign up for ADSL all the checks go "Yep, you can get it!" and then when I apply I get a response back a few days later saying the connection was unable to be provisioned because of "Technology Blockers" present on the line.

Its probably because you have grammatical errors in your subject line... good start.

we had the same problem, but both companies said they could do nothing.. somehow we ended up convince telstra to come out.. and they did it. We have underground powerlines.

did you promise the guy on the end of the line to post pics of your tits to him?

I've got optus cable, but i so wish i could get adsl. My exchange is enabled, and only 2k's away from it, but i have some s***ty equipment on the line to prevent lightning power surges and some coils to improve quality :(...

Just remember, anything is better than dialup.

persay, thats kat.

also, telstra have cable in underground estates.

Optus are doing you a favour, seriously, I've been with both, and I really don't ever want to deal with Optus ever again. Telstra cable can really depend on your suburb, I've had BPA at three houses around the southside, and outages are a once every 6 months ordeal. Not to mention, I have my mobile and home phone bundled with it, and their billing system frequently screws up and gives me discounted bills for no reason what-so-ever.

I <3 Ziggy.

also, telstra have cable in underground estates.

Where are these 'underground estates' of which you speak?

I wouldn't mind sheltering in one during an upcoming nuclear and/or Cylon war.

WARNING: Subject TYPOS are BAD