There is a piece about databases in ba dives that can be used. if no room for this hold out hold out.) Pars end with (have lost q/l for now)There were thousands and thousands of thin red and white coated twisted copper wires. Two of those pairs were mine and they were not behaving themselves.
That was Friday inside the bowels of the Civic Telephone Exchange, but the story starts before then.
It starts with a shiny new Banksia modem which came in one of those video covers. It had the words Fax Modem on it. And the letters PCMCIA (presumably the post-Cold War US secret service is now usefully making fax modems). Anyway, it is a state of the art, matchbox sized modem that slots into a notebook computer and enables you to send text and faxes down the phone line.
However, it was a little too state-of-the-art. It is a very fussy beast which demands good phone lines and connections. Alas, the 30-year-old phone system in North Canberra was not up to it.
It worked at the computer shop in Weston. (“”We’ve got all the settings right now, so it should work at your place.”) Back at the home-office Lyneham it appeared to dial out but would not connect.
So I took it to The Canberra Times office at Fyshwick. And without touching any of the settings it faxed straight out of Microsoft Word down the phone line and into the fax machine. The data line worked, too. I read the electronic messages: acerbic messages from Warden and defamatory replies from Waterford.
So it was back to Lyneham. It didn’t work.
“”Must be the phone lines, mate,” said the techo at the computer shop quite reasonably.
I phoned Telecom, and, with the swift chilly wind of competition blowing them forward, a couple of blokes arrived almost immediately. “”How urgent was it?”
Well, I had a spare, so they thought it better to start first thing the next day. As promised they arrived at 8am, and the bizarre testing of the northside telephone system began. Me with notebook computer and in-built modem and two Telecom technicians.
First, was the fault in the house? They took the line down at the guttering over the back deck. And we connected the modem. No go. The line would work with voice but not the modem. It would even work with the other, older modem.
We drove up the street to telephone pylon and connected it there. There I was squatting in the freezing morning with a notebook and modem on the footpath. Still no go.
The Telecom lads are a model of patience.
Finally, we went to the Civic Exchange. On the way, the technician told me of the tribulations (and I dare say tributes) of getting fax and modems working on lines that appear to be working normally for the human voice.
“”But I’ve never had one like this before.”
At the exchange, amid the 50,000 other lines, they extracted mine. Still it did not go.
“”Listen to it mate. No dial numbers. You computer is not dialing out.”
“”But the computer says it’s dialing. It just won’t connect.”
“”Nope. It must be the modem.”
“”It can’t be. It works in Fyshwick and Weston.”
“”Well the line is working. If the line was bad it would work here and not in Lyneham. You’ll have to leave it with us mate. We’ll connect your line up in Lyneham and get back to you on Monday.”
To their credit they had been at it for three hours and had shown that it probably wasn’t the line.
This left me with a computer shop saying it wasn’t the modem and Telecom saying it wasn’t the line.
Back to Fyshwick and the modem works like a charm, using exactly the same settings and connectors. Meanwhile, the Telecom lads have reconnected the line at Lyneham (or should that now be respelt Lineham?)
It is now Friday lunch-time, and I return to Lyneham.
Just one more try. Inexplicably, it works.
As the Telecom blokes said most of the morning, the home-office market is making heavy demands on those tiny copper wires that make up the phone network, especially in the older areas.
It is not a case of the line working or not working. It is more subtle than that. It usually works for voice, because voice is less demanding, but fax machines and modems might work some days and not others.
It means, of course, that the much vaunted information superhighway is unlikely to run on the present phone system.