Actually it's not just low on blood but stone-dead, but it'll come back -- eventually (like in the film Reanimator...).

It's all Telstra's fault (well, indirectly). For the non-AU denizens, T is the equivalent to your favourite monopoly telco from the dark ages: big incompetent semi-commercial dinosaur, strangling grip on most backbone infrastructure, ridiculous pricing, no clue, and hoarding "their" turf like Smaug, always watchful and ready to stomp the other fellows who might (gasp what a thought!) actually provide a service instead of insults. For the Austrians: yes, ÖPT/PTA just like we learned to love 'em. ("Wahlsperre", anyone?)

In short: I've got a bad case of TGRitis ("Telstra: get rooted!"), and after their recent CDMA stunt I decided to shun the monopoly and get my setup converted to ULL, unbundled local loop. Internode, my ISP, recently started offering what they call "Naked DSL2+": no classic phone service and no dial-tone, DSL on the bare metal, and they handle inbound PSTN-to-VOIP (and outbound to PSTN) calls if you want.

Sweet idea, less bandwidth-crippled than what I had before, a few dollars cheaper in the long run when the T$ charges are factored in. The only problem: ULL is something new in this country, and T$ of course make leaving their greedy clutches as painful as they can. Hence not many telephone exchanges are catered for by the others (often because T$ simply says "no you can't."). In my area that means that only Optus has equipment in the exchange and they have, well, not exactly a shiny reputation.

So Optus runs the DSLAM and backhauls to Internode. Obviously it's an Optus techie who gets to visit the exchange and frob things. Apparently there was some physical work involved, too, because they screwed that up but good:

Tue 0902 my line went down, just as advised. Different from the plan, was that the line hadn't come up again by 1600. First call to support, and on the Internode side things look fine (well, they usually have some clue but I seem not to have penetrated the helldesk layers sufficiently deeply on that call). 1700, back at home: no line sync, but actually an analog busy signal on the line. Another call to helldeks (from my mobile phone now), and yes, this is rotten and Optus will have to Do Something. Wednesday without net, phone, and no fallback to dialup either, because, well, no line to dial with.

Thursday I learned that Optus is indeed responsible for the mess and will actually have to send a techie to the exchange again. That will happen on the 10.6. Great, thanks for strangling my comms lifeline! How I love a sick ULL.

So their botched install on the 3.6. gets me a week without any comms (except the mobile phone, and at 0.6$/m that is far too pricey for anything but Really Necessary calls).