Individually, experiences with the copper network might be insignificant. But after reading many of them, does a clearer picture emerge? Credit: Magilla (canofworms.org)

This article lists experiences of Telstra's copper network from former Telstra workers, contractors and customers. It is a partner article to NBN alternative: Is Australia's copper network fit for purpose?

Some descriptions derive from comments in other articles - in which case we've contacted the person to verify their account of matters and to, where possible, expand on what they originally had to say. Other accounts derive from interviews and responses to requests for information. If you have anything to add, please do so in the comments.

James: The point is that the Telstra connection records are mostly wrong. Ask any Telstra technician - they are so unreliable that we don't bother with them anymore. To fix a connection, we just listen for an unused pair, then use that instead.

The first step in deploying FTTN would be to go through and update those records. That would require a site visit to every single house in Australia, with one tech in the house, the other at the exchange. The copper is unusable for FTTN until that is done.

The second step is to find any dodgy copper and upgrade it. Many lines (I would estimate around 20%) are borderline for ADSL. Using them for higher speeds is impossible without first replacing the copper.

The cost of doing that has to be factored into any FTTN costing, to avoid an absolutely insane cost blowout. It could easily double the cost of the project.

[Name withheld], recently retired Senior Technical Officer at Telstra: I am retired now after 40 years in the job, I have been for about 5 years so for anything recent you will need to go elsewhere.

I was a senior technical officer, but with the arrival of very reliable technology and the selling off of maintenance and installation, there was an oversupply of technical people, this led to massive redundancies across Telstra. In my own area of Central Victoria we went from having a crew of technicians at nearly every Telephone exchange, in the dozens at the bigger exchanges, to just a handful covering essentially most of Northern Victoria. The techs not targeted for redundancy were offered retraining to be linesmen. This is the way my "career" went.

Everyone in management is denying there is any problem here, but it's a huge one.

After the distribution point things get very messy, the distribution cables feed out from the main cable much like the branches on a tree, every time they branch there is a joint where over time water can enter the cable. A large part of the telephone cable network was designed long before everyone had internet or even a telephone and so cables are often undersized for the job required of them today.

From the pillar, medium to large sized cables feed to street corners where there is a large joint allowing connection to smaller street distribution, A usual street distribution cable may be 10, 20 or 30 pairs of wires running down your street serving 20 or 30 homes, there is usually a joint outside every

second house to allow smaller 2 pair "lead in" cables to feed to individual premises, every one of these joints is a potential point for a fault. Linesmen need to enter the joints to juggle wires around to get a service to a particular place or to locate a fault, which means that joints are being pulled up out of pits in the ground, opened and moved, damaging seals and even cable sheaths then being put back where water soon can enter.

In many older areas the cables in the street are quite antique, (actually fairly common) they are lead covered cables with the individual wires inside the cables insulated by being wrapped in paper, this is fine while they are dry but any moisture will completely ruin the cable. Because of the skill and time and effort required by very competent lineys to access them they are mostly done right and are

mostly OK but are very old and any movement in the pit by someone accessing say another joint can crack the lead sheath resulting in trouble. Most of the lineys with this skill are also getting old and

heading for retirement.

It worries me that people think that the telephone network cable is somehow equivalent of the cable in a Data service, it's not, Cat 5 etc is very tightly twisted to minimise the effects of capacitive and inductive coupling between pairs of wires at very high frequencies, telephone cable is usually lucky to have 2 twists per metre, just barely enough to keep the pairs of wires together when you are working on it, it's barely adequate for voice frequency signals.

Seal the CAN.

That was the catch cry by managers about 15-20 years ago, The CAN is Customer Access Network. We had managers stand up and gleefully tell us that this would mean the end of us all, as soon as everything was sealed they would get rid of everyone. They were so sure that they put in place

systems to track everyone's use of the product and were following us around to make sure that it was used. This was from top management all the way down. If lower level managers weren't policing it they were in the gun. Three strikes and you're out was another familiar catch cry, if they found you failed to use it on three joints you would be sacked on the spot. That was the policy and it was poured into hundreds of thousands of joints all over the country.

What is it?

We were told it was just a vegetable oil to which a catalyst was added to make it solidify and gel, the raw product certainly smelled like vegetable oil, there were some safety concerns about it though and

special handling protocols were set up and there were special collection points set up to take uncured gel. The cured gel could be crumbled off a joint that needed to be reopened fairly easily but it was a messy job with crumbled gel going everywhere and just the act of crumbling it out from around wires and joiners often lead to wires breaking and faults being put on, so you would access a joint, crumble the gel from the joint, test or repair or whatever was required then pour more gel back in, then the next day someone would need to access the joint again to fix the fault you had unknowingly put on.

What does it do to cables? Because of the heat and humidity the problems first started to appear in

North Queensland and the NT. Workers started to report that this stuff was actually ruining cables, these reports were ignored and if anything we were subjected to even more extreme measures to make sure we used it.

A couple of years later we started to notice that it was happening in Victoria as well, management continued to ignore it and escalated surveillance measures again because they thought it was a plot to keep our jobs. It took probably 10 or more years before it was accepted that it was causing problems, then several more years before we were allowed to stop using it. We were never officially told that it was a problem and to stop using it, managers suddenly were just very quiet about it.

To give you an idea of what it actually does to a cable I first need to describe a couple of typical cables, first is a modern grease filled cable, when the gel is poured into a joint with this type of cable the gel fills the joint and unless water gets into the joint everything is OK. Unfortunately there are lots of older cables that aren't grease filled, when a joint or cable goes faulty water will fill up the cable,

apart from causing some minor changes to the electrical characteristics and crosstalk it will usually have very little effect as the wires are plastic insulated. Now we pour some gel into a joint with a mixture of filled and unfilled cables, (most joints) in the unfilled cables the liquid gel will often travel down the cable and fill up to three metres of cable before solidifying. Where the gell and water meet a reaction takes place I presume from the action of bacteria because the resultant mess smells disgusting, an acid or some by-product attacks the plastic insulation of the wires completely destroying it, then electrolysis corrodes all the wires. As you can imagine because this is happening up to 3 metres away from the joint it becomes very difficult to fix, often needing new lengths of cable, new pits and more joints in the cable.

When you are driving around the countryside keep your eyes open for pits with guards around them and a joint taped to the guard, often wrapped in a plastic bag, Gel. Often you will see two large white PVC pipe joint covers within a few meters of each other, two joints in close proximity because a new short bit of cable had to be spliced in, Gel.

This is not a minor problem despite what management say, there are hundreds of thousands of joints filled with this stuff all over the place, any of them can go faulty any time.

Matthew Walker: I'm a Telco Engineer. I don't believe FTTN is a solution at all. FFTN relies on copper for the 'last mile'. In Australia much of this is old, reached or passed it end of life and is becoming expensive to maintain. It's also owned by Telstra, and so access to competitors relies on heavy regulation via the ACCC and like.

The actual fibre itself should last many decades, and is not subject to same environmental problems that copper is - moisture, heat, corrosion etc.

Fibre is easily upgradable via replacing the network elements at each end of the fibre. Potentially up to 100Gb/s or more. Copper is not... And don't even think you can service an entire urban population with wireless...the Physics cannot be overcome.

A company head of ICT [Name Withheld]: The situation with our telecoms is dire indeed. For example:

We had a copper line break in February, and have had a replacement line strung through trees since then as an interim solution.

That left it vulnerable to council maintenance workers, and it has therefore been cut. We now have bright tape strung all over it to avoid that.

In that case, the conduit along the street was clogged, the copper in the pits was rusted and unusable, so Telstra have decided major works are needed just to repair that one line.

Technicians attending the site have come and gone many times, shaking their head at the state of the copper. A permanent fix looks a long way off.

In March, we ordered some additional lines in a hope this would resolve the issue, but Telstra have told us they will be difficult to deliver, because there is "no infrastructure in the street."

We now need one of the additional lines for a new security system, which is running on a 3G backup for now, to the frustration of the security provider.

At one point, Telstra called and asked if we "really need the new lines," and basically begged me to cancel the order.

It is now in the hands of their infrastructure and planning department, but a resolution looks a long way off.

This was all to get one phone line repaired, and a few extras supplied. It's insane.

We can't get ADSL at our premises, as we are on an old-style, phone-only RIM, and our 3G connections are problematic due to interference from the manufacturing plant. As a result, we are now using a point-to-point wireless solution for internet that was only delivered by calling in some favours from acquaintances.

Up until we put in the point-to-point wireless solution, we were paying $3000/month for a 2Mb/s 90s-era, fibre solution. Its download limit was around 20GB per month (from memory), and we would regularly hit that in the first week of the month, paying thousands more for excess data. This was all for a service that delivered ADSL1 speeds, shared among around 150 users. It was also used for sharing data to our international operations.

Our backup connection at that stage was a dial-up modem. Shared by 150 users. Crazy.

When we wanted to download large software updates, I would actually drive home, download them there, copy them to a hard drive, and drive back to the office. That is the state of ICT for Australian companies.

I'm not familiar with the 3M issue, but it seems almost too high-tech for Telstra. I've seen pits where the water sealant is a plastic bag around the copper junction, wrapped with sticky tape.

The reality is that Telstra have seen their copper network as an unnecessary financial burden for a long time, and have maintained it to a state where it is just barely usable. Since the NBN was announced, things have degenerated further, with a long string of half-arsed interim fixes just designed to keep the network chugging along until it is superseded by fibre. Anyone wanting to use the copper as a long-term solution is dreaming. It's barely fit for use now.

I have friends on farms for whom "copper strung through trees" has been the norm for years now. Telstra have just basically given up on copper, and on their USO.

For Australian companies, this means we're in a bind. Our operations are interrupted daily by constraints that only exist because of Telstra's lack of maintenance of their network. Communications disruptions are our number one business risk. That shouldn't be the case in a first-world country.

Tony Mills, Technology Support Office who worked at 'Telecom Australia' through the 70s and now works for State Government. He stresses that his opinions are his own: "Telstra's great white elephant, that Gel for the joints" is certainly a source of copper degradation in residential and industrial estates cabled in the late 80s to early 90s as it was the "magic" solution to the time-wasting solder jointing, just twist 'em up and shove on a Gel-cap and put the lot in a plastic bag .... she'll be right for years! Well it's years and years later now and they're all "right royally rooted!"

My experience with the Gel Cap jointing revolves around what I have seen and lived with over the past 20 years or so in my local area. The estate in which I live was developed from the mid-1980s and covers about 2000 residences. I personally spoke with the Telstra workers running the cables as the streets were being built, and they told me about the new Gel Cap jointing that was being used through the whole new estate area and how it greatly reduced the labour intensive cable jointing involved and how it would increase the trouble free lifetime for the voice lines due to the joint-sealing qualities reducing the degradation caused by corrosion brought on by water penetration.

The estate is in the top of a hill so there are no flooding issues therefore any water problems would be from rainfall ingress into pits and ducts. The voice line noise here really seemed to increase in the mid-to-late 90s and then the introduction of ADSL and ADSL2+ in the 2000s really highlighted the line quality issues due to the use of higher frequencies which are increasingly attenuated by line length and are more quickly degraded by noise due to joint corrosion.

The Gel seems to have aged badly and now enhance the corrosive effect of water penetration and retains it closer to the copper wire joints for longer periods. A former Telstra worker neighbour (retired 3 years) has told me that the situation with the Gel Cap joints is well understood and too expensive to fix given the landline revenue forecasts - no wonder Telstra were happy to be paid to decommission the copper!

My situation has degraded from 16Mb/s to 8Mb/s over the past 5 years where we are only around 1 cable kilometre from our exchange with Telstra DSLAMs, and this is with a better Modem/Router which handles the line noise more gracefully - the old one just dropped out unless set back to ADSL2 mode only.

Anyway, that's it for me, and hopefully others can provide you with more detail to get this issue out as a question for the Coalition to address for their NBN to be costed as part of their renegotiation with Telstra, and how this will fit into their "cheaper" NBN policy position.

Steve B, (unverified): Well worth investigating the ongoing effect of the 3M waterproofing sealant that was applied to the pits and pillars if the copper network nearly a decade ago. This product turned corrosive and has made work on the network a nightmare for technicians. Telstra knows about this issue. It is well documented. Last estimate I saw to repair the damage was around $50Bn. This alone is grounds for declaring the copper network as 'rooted.'

Denise Bess: I worked with Telstra from 1988 until 2003, then as a sub-contractor from 2003 until 2011. I started in Sydney CBD, then worked in Moree, NSW & surrounding areas then transferred to Geraldton, WA in late 2000 also covering the large surrounding area.

As a former Telstra technician and subcontractor I can assure you that the copper network is indeed stuffed! Telstra are only willing to spend money to repair or replace as a last resort. Come out to the country anywhere in Australia and you'll find out how bad it really is. [There are] sections of temporary cable running on the ground and beside fence lines for kilometres. There is still old lead sheathed cable in the ground in many regional towns around the country. Telstra will never fix the problem because it will cost them too much! And don't get me started on pair gain systems!

The 3M sealant! It was supposed to keep the water out and if the joint was in a good condition it did keep the water out. Its main problem was that when you poured the gel into the joint (and this was mandatory up until around 2002) the gel seeped down into the cable and over time usually a few years and then started corroding the insulation on the individual copper conductors causing short circuit faults. In rural areas where everything is direct buried this was a serious problem because there was not enough spare cable to re-make the joint with most faults occurring up to a metre away from the joint itself. You then had to replace whole sections of cable. The same went for the regional towns where there was still a lot of cable direct buried. If it was in pipe there was usually not enough cable to re-make a joint anyway and again large sections needed replacing.

I could go on and on about the faults in the copper network and the 3M gel sealant. But this would take pages.

Joseph: The original copper was 0.9 which provides a better attenuation than the newer 0.4. When an old 0.9 cable needs a chunk fixed, they use 0.4 so you no longer have a contiguous piece of copper. I believe that some of the "copper" is actually aluminium so that throws another spanner in the data stream consistency works.

Copper has been around for a looooong time and is past its used by date. NBN is future proofing the data network in Australia not just for us but our children's children. Perhaps those who are against it or trying to water it down with the FTTN proposal want to keep using the two cans connected by a piece of string. With this thinking we would still be using valves instead of ICs and have a man walking in front of the horse and cart waving a flag (or lantern if at night) to warn people of an oncoming high speed means of transport.

Kim Wynn, Plant Assigner until 2007: Gordon, I worked at Telstra from 2004-2007 in a department called infrastructure services. Our job was to design new cable solutions for customers were a network fault couldn't be repaired by a field tech or in those cases were there was a day one fault in a provisioned line.

What the source has claimed doesn't surprise me and is in-line with my own experience with the Telstra customer access network. It is also in-line with what I am hearing from friends still involved with Telstra and other ISPs.

There has been a long term and systemic under spend by Telstra on general maintenance for the network, and it has been going on since privatisation occurred.

This is because as a result of Australia's Telecommunications regulations. The simple fact is that Telstra gets no competitive edge from improving line quality, it has to wholesale the line at prices set by the ACCC as either a complete service or a unbundled copper pair (ULL) which means that any network improvements benefit their competitors as much as Telstra.

Instead Telstra has decided to invest in products that give it a competitive edge in the marketplace. That's why they have continually upgraded their mobile phone and data network. That's why they upgraded their HCF cable network.

This isn't something that people in the industry want to talk about and while the reality of the situation is generally understood, it's not something that any current Telstra employee or anybody who has day to day dealings with Telstra wants publicly attributed to them...

I can confirm that in my current role I regularly see customers who are within 2.5 KM of the exchange getting ADSL speeds of under 3 Mbps and as a general observation most ADSL lines seem to work well below their theoretical specifications. My general impression is that large parts of our copper network are in a poor state and that this problem isn't limited to remote or rural areas, some of the worst affected areas are high value neighbourhoods like St Peters, Norwood and North Adelaide.

In regards to the 3M sealant I don't really have anything to add that isn't already on the public record which is that the CTs who discussed the matter with me were generally unhappy with the gel joints. Apparently they degraded the protective covering of the copper wire and because the gel was conductive it created foreign battery faults. They also disliked the gel joints because they were unpleasant and difficult to work with.

Myne: I have done frontline technical support for ADSL and PSTN for several years. This included reasonably common calls with field technicians performing repairs.

I have had business customers literally in tears, begging for services to be restored. More than once. Not the same person either. All I could say was that a "Customer Network Improvement" had been logged (which essentially means that a very long, very high number of pair cable (thousands) has zero workable spares left in it. A CNI is a lovely process that has no schedule, no escalation and essentially no hope. Most carriers offer free disconnections when a customer has a CNI. It's their way of saying "we have no hope for you and we don't want you to remain our problem."

Sure, the numbers are probably reasonably low still. They're probably only in the tens of thousands but I'd put money on it trending upwards.

Why does no maintenance occur? In many but not all cases it's simply because the cable was laid so long ago that it predates cheap plastic or asbestos conduit. Back in times gone, expensive ceramic or galvanised iron was used. When that cost too much, the cable was simply buried and fingers crossed. It wasn't going to be their problem when it died 50 years' later. Surely there'd be a budget in place by then to do it properly, right?

So it's not just a case of pulling a new cable in a duct. It's a case of looking at old drafting sheets to find the approximate location of the existing cable, carefully avoiding it while digging a new conduit, and then laying a new cable. At a cheap $150/meter, a 2km main cable can potentially cost $300,000. That's hard for a private company to justify to its shareholders for 1000 services at $16/month ULL rate - 980 of which work fine for now.

Anyhow, I don't really expect any minds to be changed. People tend to think everything is fine until they are personally affected.

[Name not given, unverified]: I personally worked for iiNet in their support and provisioning teams for a few years, an experience I would love to forget. However it did alert me to the reality of our present copper network quality and state of repair.

I have had the joy of informing a customer that their service has been pegged for CNI and the resolution time is somewhere between now and the heat death of the universe. No there isn't a resolution, no we have petitioned all available channels that we are allowed to on your behalf. Sorry best of luck with wireless.

The best part is that this isn't just the remote cattle ranches and wheat fields, this is happening in 'the burbs' often old and coincidentally wealthy suburbs are in the worst state of repair. The copper here is literally older than anyone talking about it today and most of it was wrapped in paper as there was no PVC around in those times. Most of these services live on good luck and fortune from a pantheon of smiling deities.

I have read cable records and yes there is aluminium out there, not a lot but far more in the "last mile" or 'O' pair records than would be comfortable for a retrofitted FTTN solution. 'M' pairs were primarily fat logs of pristine copper laid back when it was part of the Australian Post network. 'O' pairs are the younger thinner trunk lines serving the street. Streets change radically over 100 years and where there was 40 addresses in 1920 by 1970 there us just shy of 100 cause three blocks on the corner are an apartment block and the rest have been split into townhouses.

Cool Telecom has plenty more lines on the main trunk that they provisioned for years ago because they were run by a committee of trees at the time and thought of timescales of 100+ years... back in reality though they now need to run a second 'O' pair down the street and thread a ton more copper in, but aluminium is just so darn cheap and well it's only for phone service so it's good enough right?

Even Telstra is pushing Velocity (Fibre to the Home) in every green fields estate it can dig its claws into and if the developer is bright they will take the offer, otherwise they're gonna wait a lot longer to get the streets to their new homes wired.

I have had customers move into new homes and had to inform them that their main pair isn't in the street yet and they haven't even dug the first inch of trenching. The guesstimate completion for the main pair was "around three months" for homes already build and inhabited.

As for the "outrageous" claims of 30% failure rate for pairs per pillar per street for the whole of Australia... it actually sounds quite reasonable: these pillars are just a concatenation and termination point for a couple hundred to a few thousand pairs they are un-powered and un-monitored for 50+ years.

William Hughes, Employed at Telstra from 2002 to 2006: I worked within the Infrastructure Services business unit in numerous teams building bespoke software to do things related to fault reporting/management on the copper network (voice side, not ADSL).

For much of the time I was at Telstra, I worked in and supported teams dealing with customer impacting issues that fall through the gaps of normal processes.

Although I never went "hands on" with the network, I was back of house support and got a good picture of how the network was operated. I worked with field staff, (voice network) testers, and customer service agents.

Things I observed while at Telstra related to the copper network:

The copper CAN is highly weather affected - it was possible to predict with a high degree of certainty the number of fault reports following a storm or rain after a significant dry spell. The CAN is open to the elements, this means weather degrades it.

The copper CAN is subject to a lot of 'mechanical stress' damages - such as tree roots, backhoes. Vandalism/Arson to any visible equipment is also a major issue: pits/cabinets/junction boxes set on fire. This kind of damage is mostly in the last few hundred meters.

There is (or was) a huge number of outstanding network maintenance tasks. This is things like replacing cabling when some percentage of pairs are unusable. Telstra's budget for these replacements even back in 2006 was nowhere near the levels necessary to keep the network in top condition, so backlogs of work were piling up. From talking with the group responsible for prioritising the budget for network repairs, they indicated it was a never-ending task.

Customer anecdotes

SG Warren: A little under a decade ago we had a terrible connection in our apartment which regularly dropped out and had massive amounts of static on the line. Telstra repeatedly tells us that there is nothing else wrong on the line. Checking with the neighbours they all have the same problem.

Finally they agree to send out a technician so long as we pay for them. Since it was on my dime I decided to wait down by the junction box to see what was wrong.

The technician rocks up, opens the box and starts swearing. From what he explained to me, it turns out that none of the connections are soldered and have just had the cables wrapped around their connection points. So whenever the cables moved (as live cables do) they couldn't maintain a solid connection.

The poor guy had to solder the entire streets phone lines up. He told me that this was a fairly typical day for him.

That was about a decade ago. How does that fit with your claim that the NBN is responsible for all the bad maintenance of the Telstra network? They've been terrible for years before the NBN was even announced.

Naomi: This explanation sounds analogous to my experience here in beautiful Bayside Brissie where every other block has been split up. In 1988 I moved into my current house [built in 1955], complete with Bakelite telephone and perished cabling. Ordered a new Commander phone but found I couldn't make myself heard on calls most of the time. Complained and complained, nfg nfa. Noticed roll out of fibre optic cable progressing down the street about 10 years later, signed up for Optus TV and phone as soon as a rep stuck a foot in the door. Wonderful auditory service suddenly from new coax cables. Had to drop Optus cable for financial reasons and return to Big T - back came all the noise, drop outs and mandatory 3-day outages. More complaints. Fluked a tech who knew his stuff and could be bothered doing it. He mined back along the u/g cable to adjacent pit where he found some underhand pit dweller employed to lay gas lines, had busted into the T pit and T cable then cobbled it back together himself to avoid massive penalties from predatory Big T. Who says crime doesn't pay?

My one in a million tech repaired the cold joint then ran new coax to take off points which worked at last, for a while.

I joined the internet revolution finally some 6 years ago, initially on dial up. We literally could not get majority of sites to open before connections reset etc. Jumped ship to Westnet basic ADSL - better initially but within 2 years it slowed down, and phone service was once more attenuated for no logical reason anyone was prepared to share with me. Situation improved again when Westnet were allowed to offer a local phone service. Must have had some leverage on 'Big T' at first. Westnet keep upgrading my data quotas [now 10+10MB] but I would need a 36-hour day to be able to use more than my current usage. And my data rates are 'comparably good' for the locale. I guess iiNet realise I can never approach theoretical ADSL+ service levels they have offered me gratis so they've lost nothing.

An indicator of how highly Telstra values its 'legacy' network: Last year consequent to my bitter complaints over 5 day phone/ADSL outage due to line damage elsewhere in my street, iiNet were moved to pursue Telstra to repair some pits. I tackled Brisbane City Council at the same time, pointing out that every Telstra pit you care to look at is slumped, often with cracked linings and lids, as most are now located within renovated concrete footpaths. Replacing bitumen and grass paths with concrete slab paths was an initiative of BCC commenced nearly 20 years ago, and ongoing. Telstra and other utilities were meant to fix their bits [but never seemed to, away from shopping centres].

That was in 01/12. In 07/12, BCC sent me $100 for my nosy annoying activity. Thanks, but later in 08/12, still no pit repairs, I pointed out. Oh, it's going to happen this quarter! Just before Xmas, pit outside the church & Blue Care complex over the road is fixed, 3 others within 100m are ignored. More phone calls from 'eyes in the suburb.'

In 02/13 preparatory work around each pit was performed by some contractors, stripping away damaged bits, re-forming etc. And that's where it stays, boxing and barriers are slowly falling over, waiting for ? to return and finish the job.

Peter: What the author states fits exactly with my experience of the past week when the Telstra technician completely failed to repair my naked line (indeed he cut it at the madison box and left it cut) and simply connected me up via the second pair of cables running to my house. Of course he didn't tell me that he'd used the second line. He also declared 'no work done' so it wasn't till I opened up the Madison box (which of course we're actually not allowed to do by Telstra - lest we see the rubbish work of their technicians) and saw what the Telstra tech had done that I, and my ISP, managed to find a fix.

Incidentally my ISP also told me exactly the same story as the writer of this article regarding how Telstra don't fix lines anymore, they just try and route around them. Also, I am on the Northern Beaches. We are NOT EVEN ON THE NBN plan yet in my area - so 2019 at the absolute earliest. And there is NO cable alternative. And my ADSL2+ is now running at almost half the speed of four years ago.

[No name given, unverified]: I have long suffered poor telephone service and on top of that poor ADSL service as the telephone lines in my area are quite degraded. There are no longer any spare pairs. Faults are now patched over using split pairs (i.e. find a single good wire out of the defective pairs and use that). ADSL (or VDSLx for that matter which is what the Liberals plan uses) expects to work over twisted pairs for noise rejection. My line uses split pairs. Whenever an unknown person in my neighbourhood lights up their ADSL service mine goes to hell due to crosstalk.

That's the reality that Telstra et al are desperately trying to cover up.

[No name given]: Actually, most lines are insulated with paper. According to ACMA "The most common type of Communications Wire, viz., 0.4mm Paper Insulated Unit Twin (PIUT) copper pair cable, is taken to be representative of the behaviour of customer access loops."

A 30 years life for the copper cables would be generous at best, most have been there for a lot, lot longer and the amount of faults on active and inactive pairs would reservedly be 30% but likely far higher.

Do keep in mind Telstra also don't include the individual cases in Mass Disruptions, which is a handy way for them to not have to pay out CSG claims when a customer's phone line doesn't work for a couple weeks and a great way to stand by the 'only 1.3% of lines are effected by faults'.

There is no mystery as to why anyone in the industry or who has every had anything to do with telecommunications in a meaningful role is frothing at the mouth for the NBN rollout, the primary complaint is 'GET HERE FASTER!'

Shannon: Since buying my place and moving in, I've had Telstra contractors out at least once per year, every time they've laughed at the pair I'm on then spent an hour wandering up and down the street finding me another pair, which gets me through for another 6-12 months.

I'm not on a rim, I can see the exchange from the end of my street, and I'm lucky to get 12Mbit, usually 9, from my service because of the copper.

I believe the 30 per cent figures.

Travis: Have a look at the RIM information on adsl2exchanges.com.au for most of the exchanges in Sydney (I especially recommend looking at older areas such as Glebe, Redfern, Haymarket, Kensington). Or is Sydney too regional for you? Perhaps you'd like to have a glance at some of the exchanges in the ACT such as Belconnen or Gungahlin.

I've lived in 4 properties (all in Canberra) since moving out of home, and in 2 of those it took at least3 attempts by Telstra techs before a working copper pair could be found, and in one of the other 2; we practically had no internet when it rained.

So by my experience; only 30% 'rooted' would be a pretty good rate.

Benzo: I live in a central VIC town that has over 100,000 people so it's not too remote but even here 3 out of the 4 house I have lived in in that last 10 years were not able to maintain a connection in bad weather/rain, and the speeds have been pretty bad when it is working.

Touch wood i have never had an issue at my current place but I'd say that has something to do with it being a brand new house and therefore, a new line.

Louise Kelly: My phone line is down again today. The overhead lines in our northern NSW village of Hillgrove are all rotting away. Every time there is a strong wind we lose our dial tone. The last time a technician came out he found the problem up the road a bit, where he said the plastic sheath around the line 'disintegrated in his hand' and the copper line is corroded. He also said that we had Buckleys of getting the line replaced unless we could demonstrate one of us had a life threatening medical condition. Now I didn't ask his name and he could lose his job for letting on something like that, I should think. I have had episodes of tachycardia in the past, though not for the past two years. It certainly can be life-threatening within the time it would take for an ambulance to get out here. I am seriously considering getting my doctor to confirm (and possibly play up) the risk if it will help to get this line renewed.

We have Satellite internet because our exchange was never ADSL enabled, nor do I think the infrastructure would carry the signal without replacing it all. VOIP doesn't function well over Satellite, so we can't do without our landline on the old copper wire. All the copper services here would have been pair-gained as well to save Telstra money.

I have a retired friend who worked as a linesman for Telstra all his life and what he tells me agrees with the whistleblower of 10 years' experience spoken of in this article. It would be very reasonable that a linesman would only have to work for 12 months to see the pattern of the obvious under their nose every day.

The least the Government could do is ensure that existing copper in areas not getting ADSL is properly maintained. But it looks like the copper network left behind is going to be allowed to disintegrate if our village is any indication. Also, the Coalition's fibre-to-the-node is not a serious option for anyone, and certainly not for our village (even if by some miracle our insignificant local exchange found itself with fibre) if the copper that is here cannot carry voice reliably, let alone an ADSL connection.

Matthew: Back in the early 90's I requested a new line to my parents' house to run a modem. Of 6 pairs running up to the house, 4 were so rotten they couldn't carry any signal. Of the remaining two, one was the existing line and wouldn't have supported a 9600 baud modem, and the other was worse. The technician ended up running a line from the house next door. And that was an inner suburb of a capital city. The whole street was about the same.

Anyone who thinks the nation's copper can guarantee 14Mb/s needs to lay off the hops. Telecom cut a few corners.

Elsewhere

There are a couple of detailed blogs about personal experiences: From 2011 and from 2010.

Here is an explanation of one particular set of circumstances from Telstra's own site.