We had a call from one of the Melbourne integrators we do work for requesting a mini-audit at a site to determine what the various lines were for and could we have a look at their ADSL as it was running very slow. The circuit was provided by Macquarie Telecom on the Telstra network and previously Telstra had a attended site and found the circuit OK to the MDF.
This site has 2 x ADSL circuits; one for the office and one for streaming catch-up television to the various screens around the premises. The office ADSL was indeed running very slow but the one for the televisions was running very well.
I managed to trace the circuit back to the Main Distribution frame using my trusty oscillator and probe. Tracing it back to the customer side was straightforward but due to the volume of jumpers it was quite difficult to trace it back to the carrier side. As can be seen from the picture, this MDF is in quite a mess.
I picked up the tone on the carrier side but was unable to null it by shorting the pair. A little more poking around with the probe revealed why – the jumper was broken about 20cm above the lead-in pair.
Despite being a fairly large player I believe Macquarie gets a raw deal from the carriers whose services they re-bill. Several of my customers use Macquarie and the hoops they, and therefore we, have to jump through with requests for additional information, call examples, etc is quite ridiculous. In this case I have a feeling that had the ADSL been a Telstra circuit then the tech would have just run in a new jumper and fixed the fault without further delay. He couldn’t have failed to miss the broken jumper but his responsibility ends at the lead-in cable.
Once I ran a new jumper and returned to the customers office full speed had been restored on the ADSL. If you have a problem with your Internet, contact us and we will see what can be done about it.
