Telstra sets target date for BigPond cable SLA - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Telstra sets target date for BigPond cable SLA

By Simon Sharwood, ZDNet Australia
November 10, 2003
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Telstra-sets-target-date-for-BigPond-cable-SLA/0,139023166,120280751,00.htm

Telstra today confirmed it was targeting an early-2004 date for kickoff of a service level guarantee for users of its BigPond cable Internet service.

The move -- first flagged in June this year-- would bring the cable offering into line with its ADSL products, which carry a 99 percent uptime guarantee.

-A service level guarantee for BigPond cable is being worked on," a Telstra spokesperson said. -We can't say when the guarantee will be available but it will be within a few months.

-The expectation is that it will be early next year."

The comments came after NSW BigPond cable users experienced a 35-minute outage from 8:30am today. Authentication equipment had to be reset after its failure made it impossible for users to log on to the cable internet system.

A similar outage prevented logon in late August, yet the Telstra spokespersons said such incidents are not related to the capacity of the company's infrastructure, as midday and afternoons are the peak times for logons to the cable network.

The spokesperson added that Telstra perceives this kind of short outage as reasonable - ... given the complexity of the technology involved."

-Things like this can happen at any time," the spokesperson said, stating that the majority of cable customers are not businesses, a factor he hopes made the outage less of an issue. -For any customer in this situation it is obviously frustrating, but it was fixed pretty quickly."