Hello NBN

If yesterday had been a perfect Autumn day, today was anything but. Sometime during the evening the predicted storms arrived with a vengeance. The rain poured heavily all night and the wind steadily built up to a real crescendo. I recently learned that Melbourne has received as much rain in the first three months of 2020 than it had in the whole of 2019. That is quite a statistic, especially as it was only a couple of months ago that it seemed that the entire state of Victoria was engulfed in bushfires. Another example of how quickly things can change.

When the sun rose this morning the storm was still raging. It was very obvious that there would be no bike riding today. This was a reminder that winter was surely drawing closer and that we would have many cold days indoors in the months ahead. Since our main connection with the outside world is the Internet, we will become increasingly dependent on having a reliable connection with a generous bandwidth.

At that stage I had an idea. Since, for the foreseeable future, we will no longer be living in Pakenham, I wondered if it would be possible to transfer our NBN service from Pakenham to Inverloch. I suspected that there would be a hundred reasons why it could not be done, but I have learned that you never know unless you ask.

I wasn't even sure if our Internet company Aussie Broadband would be open during Easter, but I decided to call them anyway. One thing I really appreciate about Aussie Broadband is that they are situated nearby in Morwell and that their support staff all speak Australian English. Soon I was chatting to a friendly young man who knew exactly where Inverloch was (something you would never get with those call centres in Manilla). I explained what I would like to do with my Internet connection. To my surprise he said that it "should not be a problem". After a few minutes I had begun the transfer process. It was simple and painless. What I didn't know was how long it would take for the NBN to be connected to our house in Inverloch. I suspected that it would be a couple of weeks at least.

You could therefore imagine my surprise when my phone chirped with an incoming SMS about an hour later. It told me that my new service was now "ready for use". I connected the router and was delighted when the Internet was up and running just a few minutes later. The NBN often gets bad publicity when things go wrong, but I could not believe how quick the whole process had been . There was no charge for the transfer and I did not have to enter a contract. How good was that ?

The rest of the afternoon was spent experimenting with our new and improved Internet connection and trying to learn how to use Skype. It might help to maintain our sanity over the next few months.Read more