Long story short......

My trusty Motorola SB3100 died. Called Optus and they said $99 call out fee and $80 for a new modem :(

I source my own modem and run through the 'setup' cd-rom. Eveything went fine until it said call your provider and they will need the 'mac' number. I cal Optus and the was informed a technician needs to come out to set-up the modem. When asked why he said that the modem and line needs to be tested, if not the whole network could come down.

Fast forward to this morning. The tech comes out (sub-contractor). I give him the run down on what happened. He said 'What do you need me for? Just call Optus with the mac number.' I explained it wasn't supposedly that simple. He laughed, got out his mobile, called Optus gave them the serial number and mac number of the modem. A minute later I was online.

No testing no nothing, except one phone call, me staying at home for 5 hours waiting and a $99 bill.

Needless to say I am mighty pissed off as it was obvious that it can be done over the phone. The tech even said it was a joke that he had to come out to do it.

Anyway that was my morning.

you will probably find that part of optus policy is to have one of their techs do it to cover themselves on their insurance policys. that way they are covered in case you do take down the network they have the right to sue you to get their money and i mean what sort of person is gonna have the money to cover an outage like that?

I'm sure Optus have many reasons they could rattle off but as I said he just read the numbers from the modem. That's it.

I already had it connected up and he didn't check anything.

sounds like bs to me bad luck dude.

i went through multiple modems when i had optus cable and never needed to know my mac address

and i only paid $10 for my 4200 ;p


and $99 for call out? wtf.. i had to have them come out to test & fix the line f***loads of time and never got charged - although i never needed them to help me install new modems

last edited by Jerry at 17:53:21 30/Dec/04

you should have just changed the modems over and just rung them up and told them that your modem wasnt working

you should have just changed the modems over and just rung them up and told them that your modem wasnt working

That's what I did. That's why they sent out a tech cause they couldn't fix it over the phone.

That sucks dude. However, I'm with Optus and so far I can't say a bad thing about them. Only been down for 2 hours outta the last 3 years I've been with them.

^I'm the same. Never had a problem except for when it was down a couple of weeks ago. I think they tried calling but I was only just waking up and didn't answer the phone. Guess they thought noone was home.

im with rev also the only downtime apart from optus general maintenance was when i first got optus and that was because of a dodgy cable which goes from the wall plate to the modem.

I also agree that I can't really say a bad thing about them, other than this.

I thought about changing providers but the service has been really good over the last 3-4 years.

Me having to them them $99 to continue using their service makes me sad :(

I'm going to dispute it and see what happens.

Oi! Oi! Oi!