After years of waiting, the National Broadband Network is finally available at my home address from today. I had pre-ordered an NBN deal from a different provider than my current phone/ADSL provider which is Optus. My new soon-to-be provider rang me this afternoon to tell me that they are ready to connect me, but to do so they needed me to confirm my ULL ID with Optus.
What is a ULL ID? It seems that it is a 10 digit number (starting with 161) that uniquely identifies the copper line connected to your house. Given the frustrating and time consuming interactions I’ve had with Optus in the past, I wasn’t too excited or hopeful about extracting this information from them.
So how long does it take to confirm a ULL ID with Optus? The answer turned out to be 44 minutes.
| Time | Duration (minutes) | Activity |
| 18:44 – 18:50 | 6 | Try to find a phone number on the Optus website to ring technical support. It is almost unbelievable how hard it is to find a phone number to ring a phone company! |
| 18:50 – 19:04 | 14 | Give up on ringing Optus and have a go with their Live Chat support. After initiating a request for live chat, wait ….
|
| 19:04 – 19:10 | 6 | Live chat with service agent for six minutes before she decides that it would be better to ring me and have a vocal instead of written conversation. |
| 19:10 – 19:12 | 2 | Brief conversation with service agent where she understands what the request is and that she will need to transfer me to the technical support team. |
| 19:12 – 19:24 | 12 | Waiting … listening to horrid hold ‘music’. |
| 19:24 – 19:28 | 4 | Brief conversation with technical support agent who reasonably quickly understands what I’m asking for, confirms my details, puts me on hold for a minute or so while he looks up the ULL ID and then supplies me with the ULL ID.
Yay. |
| TOTAL | 44 |
Lets see how things go now with my new provider in connecting me to the NBN.
We moved to New Lambton just over 12 months ago. The home is wired with “industrial strength” internet and cabling to boot. During this time I have been able to conect through the modem a fantastic period of…. 30 minutes. The rest of the time is via my mobile phone using the “Wi-Fi” hot spot. We have had a least 6 tech guys come, check the set up, try different modems and announce the problem is a cable issue down the street. And for the same price these folks say they can fix it shortly.
I can harly wait for the process to start all over when we are told “you have the NBN”