Communications Technician

In the morning I just bring the laptop out to the vehicle, we just plug it in, and then we log in. At the moment we've got an 8 to 12 appointment this morning, we get to provide our own vehicle drill bits, and pieces got some spare phones. I carry all our safety gear as well, different test equipment. We've got meters, we basically carry everything we might need for the day.

My name's Timmy's, a Telstra cable technician, I did a nine-month traineeship through his skill group, they offer in-classroom training and on-the-job training, and now I've basically got my own vehicle, and we just work independently throughout the day to complete the jobs to the customer.

The customer is having an issue with their fax machine, they're unable to send or receive faxes at the moment. We just need to have a chat with the customer and find out what's going on.

Chat with the customer and find out what's going on

'Hi, my name's Tammy, I'm calling from Telstra in Perth, how're you doing today? I've just picked up the job to come to take a look at the line for you, I just want to confirm with you what sort of issues we're having.' 'We're just having some troubles?' 'Are sending receiving faxes, is that correct?

That sounds like they could be something to do with the issue, that's okay. We can come and have a look at it for you and just a little see what's going on. ' 'Okay, thanks very much, bye.'

I haven't had received effects, that's not unusual, I might or might not of, but everything's plugged incorrectly, that's all up and running. So it looks okay, we just got a diversion tone, absolutely normal dial tone, again diversions off. So you're getting sort of an error message, so I do it, just say unable to send us it, just comes up our pressuring Telstra, that's all. It's hitting it with a number, I'm just won't even give me some details on our customer service.

Basically what's happened is the customers had before, this actually worked in retail, so there was a bit of like a bit of computer work, just doing out rosters, and keeping track of money and all that sort of stuff. A bit of computer stuff involved, just had sort of A's and B's when I finished high school. It's just a standard sort of thing, if you have any IT sort of background or anything like that then that obviously helps you to advanced a bit quicker or you'll probably pick up the skills a bit quicker.

The optic fiber in place reduces the chance of faulty or wrong

The National Broadband Network which is the NBN is coming through at the moment, and that's where they're installing optic fiber, it's going to be from the exchange at this point to the customers premises, so that's going to make all the copper cabling obsolete optic fiber, obviously provides a lot faster services and better services.

What the copper can and basically means that we shouldn't really have to be doing any work on it, once the optic fiber is in place there's very little chance of it going faulty or anything going wrong. So it's more of an I guess an assured service as well because we're not expecting or anticipating any problems with it.

Do some cabling to assist

Once it goes in welcome cells retention yep, and his number is just got a call from our head office. One of our other Tech's actually needs an assist, so do some cabling. There's no lead-in cable or any cable inside the building in places as far as he's told me, just sort of go have a look good at what he's doing and give him a hand to run some cabling, and hopefully we can put us off it on and get the customer.

I reckon easiest ways, we just dig, put the pipe into there. As far as we can gather at the moment they've put some pipe in, they haven't actually connected it to the pipe coming out of our pit. When we put the rods down it's actually going under the driveway now.

If we were going to connect it how they originally did it? We'd have to actually remove the pavers in the driveway, and that's going to be quite a big issue. It might be easier for us if we can dig a trench from here to the wall, we'll just install a pipe in here, and just finish installing.

What needs to be done the challenges in this job is obviously being outdoors in the weather conditions, so in summer gets quite hot and obviously, in winter we've got to deal with the storms and rain.

We can't do a lot of work while that's happening quite physical, so the further you go out towards the bushland becomes a lot harder to find the cable pits, and different locations, and stuff like that, learning new systems at the moment, different bits and pieces, but ideally I would like to move into more sort of complex roles and just learn more skills as we go.

Opportunity to upskill and different areas

There is a lot of opportunities to upskill and there are different areas within the Telstra company, you can actually work. If you change, you don't want to be working on the actual Network, there's stuff like Network integrity, there are the people in head office, so you can do that sort of stuff, it just depends on what you're interested in.

I'm noticing something wrong here, where's connected at the back, I just want to test the lines of the customers house, and just sort of see if there are any faults in the line or what's actually going on, there have a look at the restaurant.

So I just pressed s on there, and I just sort of see what brought results were getting. So we've got the line open here at the moment, so this will test from the exchange to where the lines open, here just give an idea.

Find the issue and fix

If there are any issues at the moment there's all tone is working here and clear here, so we might have to go to the house and to see if anyone's home, and just check out what's going there as well. I've just checked the line at the wall box at the side of the house, now we've got a clear dial tone there.

So it generally indicates there could be a problem with the customer's internal cabling inside the building or it could be that the switched legs back at the cabinet was the issue that was cutting off a dial tone.

We fix that up, so we'll do is we give the customer a few more minutes to see if they're going to come home if they're still not available we actually leave a card in the letterbox just to say what time we attended and what we found.

If they're still having a problem they can book an appointment when someone can be home, and we can come out and have a looking inside the house, and just find out what's going on for them, that's the next step.

Other web page resource

Communications Technician: Job Description, Duties and Salary: https://study.com/