Fibre may be fast but installation crawls
How much patience do you have with service providers when they drop the ball? Has your tolerance threshold been seriously corroded, as a post-quake legacy?
The average Canterbury householder has endured hundreds – if not thousands – of hours dealing with the Earthquake Commission and their respective insurer in the course of rebuilding their lives.
For many, having to contend with the army of paper-shuffling, clipboard-toting, ticket-clipping, red tape-regulating, high visvested cooks and cowboys in the kitchen made that journey through the post-quake ringer more soul-destroying than the disaster itself.
With all that psychological scar tissue still rather raw, I suspect our collective tolerance for bungling incompetence by service providers has been zapped.
I know the end of my proverbial tether is definitely shorter than it used to be. Lately, I’ve felt like an unsuspecting passenger who boarded a wonky train for an offthe-rails ride through the funny farm of ultra-fast fibre.
It all started in early June with an ominous letter from Spark advising me that winter moisture levels in the soil is no friend to their ‘‘aging’’ copper wire and to avoid the inconvenience of internet outages, make the fussfree switch to ultra-fast fibre broadband (UFB).
Uncannily right on cue, as if by conspired magic, a flurry of service outages struck at home – so I duly signed up to the ‘‘exciting future of UFB’’.
The city council-owned monopoly, Enable, is responsible for the fibre roll-out contract across greater Christchurch, contracting a variety of telco technicians from the likes of Downer to do the leg work – mostly foreign workers.
As you probably know, the three-step process entails a site visit where the scope of delivering fibre to your house is agreed to, followed by the external works and the final internal installation.
But what should have been a simple one-week exercise has descended into a six-week-long comedy of errors – and counting. Without boring you with every fine detail, I’ve now had three external scopes carried out and over a dozen contractors drifting through my property.
The first scope recommended threading the fibre through the orange pipe on the side of my driveway, which had been purposefully laid for the fibre rollout, when it was resurfaced, postquake.
A week later, a Downer contractor turned up to complete the internal installation – not that he could, as the external works hadn’t been done.
He called his boss to alert him to the problem.
Later in the day, another Downer contractor knocks on the door wishing to come inside to complete the installation. Argh! When I advised him that the external works hadn’t been carried out, he tellingly remarked, ‘‘Oh my God – no-one knows what we are meant to be doing. ‘‘You’re telling me.
Unbeknown to my assorted door-knockers, the external contractors had deemed the pipe unusable, because it was coloured orange and could be mistaken as a conduit for power supply. Apparently Enable-friendly pipes need to be red.
Further phone calls to Enable trigger another site visit, a new scope, and a fresh plan to lay a trench alongside the driveway to carry the fibre to the house.
Sure enough, several days later, there are more knocks at the door from Downer contractors wishing to complete the internal installation work, despite no sign of any trench or fibre being laid. More phone calls to Enable finally unearth the revelation that the trench work couldn’t be done due to intrusive overhanging foliage.
Apparently, through the miracle of osmosis, the homeowner was meant to be told that he should prune it before any work could commence.
At this point, Archangel Michael lost any semblance of saintly patience, short-circuited, and demanded to speak to an able Enable manager who could indeed enable the installation.
The ensuing ‘‘cavalry to the rescue’’ response has been equally startling, with six network managers and specialists swooping on my property last week, to apologise, placate me, and offering reassurance that I’m ‘‘not a complex case’’. Nor is the property. Supposedly, it’s now back on track.
But Downer’s communication dysfunction is deplorable, as is the wider inefficient waste of resource and frittering of money – particularly when it’s the taxpayer that’s bankrolling this project.
What should have been a simple oneweek exercise has descended into a six-week-long comedy of errors.