KEY POINTS:
I've learned a lesson about the risks of being at technology's leading edge in the past few weeks. I've also learned the difference between an old-fashioned phone company and companies that have ridden into town on the internet, glibly calling themselves telcos.
And wait - there's been more learning still. I've confirmed what a rotten phenomenon the rise of the call centre/telephone support service is. And, surprisingly, I've discovered I'm more patient than I've ever given myself credit for - although my family might dispute that.
Crikey, you'll be thinking, what a valuable experience I must have had. Yeah, well, I'm trying to think of it like that, but it's not really working.
It's all my own fault, of course. When internet service provider Orcon said it could upgrade my broadband connection from plain old ADSL to the much faster ADSL2+, I leapt at the chance. Orcon would also provide my phone service.
This was to have been the crowning achievement of local loop unbundling: as one of a handful of ISPs with hard-won access to Telecom's phone exchanges, Orcon was first out of the blocks with the new-generation broadband service.
At its launch in one of Auckland's smartest inner-city eateries in mid-March, the ISP's 20-something boss, Scott Bartlett, declared "the handbrake was coming off" broadband. I was a bit sceptical, for reasons I'll explain, but hopeful.
For the previous few months I'd been part of a trial of the service on a disused second line into my house, reactivated for the purpose. Initially, I was underwhelmed. The speed improvement wasn't great - 5 megabits a second rather than the 4Mb/s I was getting from ordinary ADSL on my main home line.
A replacement modem lifted the speed to 6 to 7Mb/s. That was still a long way from ADSL2+'s theoretical maximum of 24Mb/s, but Orcon's technology chief said that could be because the trial line hadn't been used for several years and was slowed by oxidation.
That sounded plausible, and gave me hope that if my main line was switched to the new service, I should see speeds of 10-11Mb/s. This wasn't just naive optimism (or not entirely) on my part, but was based on the reports of Bartlett and other Orcon staff whose homes, like mine, are connected to Telecom's Ponsonby phone exchange and who are all getting 15Mb/s or more.
A couple of them live within 1km of the exchange but another, like me, is about 2km away. Line length and condition matter more with ADSL2+ than with ADSL.
After Bartlett's speech, those present were invited to take a look at Orcon's shiny new Siemens ADSL2+ box at the exchange, and many pictures were taken of the beaming Bartlett.
So when Orcon declared the new service commercially available, I quickly said yes. I had misgivings about the voice component of the service, which had been unreliable on the trial line. But I was assured the bugs had been ironed out.
My line was duly changed to ADSL2+ on April 2, and thus began my lesson in life at technology's bleeding edge. The first clue that the cut-over to Orcon's gear had happened was that my phone now displayed the caller's number, a service I'd already been paying for, but which the exchange didn't support.
A day or two later, Orcon's ADSL2+ "home hub" - a modem, or router, by yet another name - arrived and I plugged it in, expecting to be stunned by its speed. No such luck. The home line with ADSL2+ was much slower than the "oxidised" trial line, and slower even than the standard ADSL service.
Next, the phone started playing up. Outbound calls were possible only after first calling my own number from another phone, which seemed to reset the line. And inbound callers heard not a word when the phone was answered.
I embarked on an endless series of calls to the Orcon helpdesk. First, your patience is tested by the 15-minute or longer wait to talk to someone, all the while getting a recorded message telling you your call is important to them. Not half as important as it is to me, mate.
Then, as further punishment, you must retell your tale of woe to each helpdesk person you speak to. After going through this routine several times, you discover that their expertise extends only as far as looking up your account details, getting you to restart your modem, then, when that fails to fix your problem, logging a request ("raising a ticket") in the system for a higher level of support.
They are gatekeepers, in other words, for the people who might actually be able to help. As it turned out, a big "might".
I was eventually told there was a problem with the shiny new Ponsonby box, that I wasn't the only affected customer, and that two whiz kids from Australia (or China, according to another account) were popping over to fix it. It would all be solved by the end of the weekend (five days after the cut-over).
It wasn't. By now, I'd abandoned my home phone line and plugged everything into the trial line which, fortunately, hadn't been disconnected and, oddly, had none of the other line's problems, despite being connected to the same exchange.
About this time I realised we'd entered a new era of telecommunications, in which "phone companies", as Orcon calls itself, can no longer be relied on to know what they're talking about, and accountability has gone out the window. (Not to say that I didn't deal with some thoroughly sincere Orcon staff - I did, but they just weren't very effective.)
It took a linesman from Telecom contractor Downer to eventually fix my phone - nine days after Orcon took responsibility for the service. For all the complaining I've done about Telecom, I've never had to wait that long for a fault to be fixed.
It transpired that my line was plugged into a dud port on the shiny Siemens box, discovered when the Downer technician ran a test before driving over to check the house's wiring. We've never encountered a bad port before, said Orcon. Maybe it learned something too.
So the phone works. What about my broadband speed, did I hear you ask? Don't. That's another thing I've learned - to stop doing speed tests. I only get disappointed all over again. I remain hopeful, though, that it too will be fixed. That's how patient I am.
* Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist
