A picture of my cat, Esme, sitting on a chair on my apartment's balcony with her paws hanging over the front of the chair, wearing a harness. Sunlight and calm.

Esme enjoying the sunlight and cool breeze on the deck.

Though bloody exhausting, the move was successful. Many stressors and complications were overcome. For renters, there are many:

  • The hunt for a new home.
  • The application process.
  • The budgeting.
  • The move itself. Oww.
  • The bond cleaning.
  • The real estate agents.
  • The utilities.
  • The great transfer of NBN connections.

We managed them quite well. Thankfully, I had time off work so I could lift a lot of the weight – literally and metaphorically – while my other half trudged on through work commitments as well .

As hinted through the winky italicisation above, getting the internet connected was an ordeal. Our new apartment is in a complex composed of three buildings. Each has apartments numbered from one through to twelve. There are three main distribution frames (MDFs), one for each building. These connect the NBN fibre to the internal building copper (sigh) networks and so you have Fibre-to-the-Building (FttB).

That's the set up.

For the ISP to provide us with an internet connection they need the identifier for the copper pair "C pair" that links to our apartment which is wired up in the MDF. They hoof the internet into that.

Alas, it so happened that they had an incorrect C pair value. Someone else was chugging down the internet that I was unwittingly paying for. When I called the ISP and explained, they read out to me the MAC address of a modem that they insisted was mine. It was not.

Three weeks and much ado later, they finally agreed to request an appointment with an NBN tech to visit and isolate the correct C pair. According to the tech, whoever provided the C pair value to the ISP had just picked the first apartment number that matched mine. They gave them my apartment, but in another building.

All fixed now. And while I have internet again, it is 10 times slower than the FttP internet at my last house at just 100mbps down. I will have to live with that I suppose. Though the abandonment of FttP for all Australians remains a tragedy given the proclivity for complications with the current multi technology mix strategy. A national embarrassment.

Otherwise, I'm very happy in the new digs. Good breeze, lovely birdsong, more space, cheaper rent! I shouldn't really complain.