My 85yo mother was in an area forced to take NBN. The equipment is too complex even for me to understand (60yo). BUT let me not start fuming over that or I might start mentioning all the hassles in the installation process. The problem now is - her telephone keeps disconnecting, sometimes only seconds into the call. I think it has been getting worse for about a month or so. Everyone in her neighbourhood is complaining about the same problems. In fact while visiting her the other day I heard the guy next door arguing with someone on his phone that he didn't hang up and he is fed up with the phone calls failing. As are we all. I rang the faults number for NBN from my own phone at home and just as well I used mine and not hers - the waiting time would have been too long for her phone. Unfortunately, after having managed my way around the recorded messages and somebody at the other end with a foreign accent I could hardly understand, I was eventually asked to use my mobile phone so that I could ring my mother and stay in contact with the foreign helper at the same time, but by the time I found my mobile phone and discovered that the battery was flat, the helper had vanished. I haven't received a call back. Actually I now remember that I live in a black hole area where mobile phone coverage is non-existent, so that idea was never going to work anyway.
So I thought I would try online research instead. I found a Telstra troubleshooter page and one of the tips was to turn off the NBN box for half a minute and then power it on again. I rang my mother several times advising her to try this out (the phone kept cutting out before I could get the message through). Unfortunately this seems not to have worked.
There was a time when phones always worked just fine and there were public phoneboxes we could all use without problems, and now there is NBN spaghetti-wiring that drops calls, black holes that don't allow mobile connections, and help via the phone (if you have one that works) after a half hour or more dealing with recorded messages instead of people and people who can hardly speak English - but only if the help remembers to ring back.
Anyway are there any suggestions about how to fix my mother's NBN connection?