Burnt BigPond customers grab spam, virus protection

Sources told ZDNet Australia the total number of customers to have registered for the three month offer to date was around 80,000-100,000. Prior to the brown-out, around 10,000 customers had registered for the software for a fee levied on top of their existing BigPond access charges. Telstra has extended the three-month offer to that 10,000 as well.

Telstra's chief executive officer, Ziggy Switkowski, announced the offer two weeks ago as part of moves to appease customers hit by weeks of e-mail delays caused by a 25-30 percent surge in traffic the telecommunications heavyweight blames on the Swen virus. The company also said it would offer customers two weeks' free BigPond access as compensation for their difficulties.

Some broadband commentators claim the three month trial -- which expires on 17 January -- represents a "sales opportunity," with the carrier hoping enough customers will elect to pay for the service after that date to make a dent in the revenue lost as a result of the two weeks' free access.

BigPond, Australia's largest Internet service provider, has a customer base of around 1.5 million.

The carrier is spending around AU$100 million on a range of measures to boost BigPond's capabilities, including a new platform, the augmentation of specialist help-desk resources, improvement of call-centre resources resources for BigPond customers and the introduction of a browser-based customer information service.

Other improvements include simplified and easier billing processes and engines and rationalised technology design.

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How come Bigpond customers get ...Anonymous -- 31/10/03

How come Bigpond customers get so much spam?

I recently changed my email address to a random sequence of letters a month ago and was careful only to give it to friends and not use it on newsgroups or web sites. However today I received my first spam addressed to this address.

Either spammers are targetting totally random strings for account names or bigpond is somehow releasing customers email addresses to spammers to increase the value of their anti-spam "product" (which should be a free service anyway)...

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T(H)elstra sleeze does it agai ...Keith Styles (An irate user) -- 31/10/03

T(H)elstra sleeze does it again. They should have provided these products free all users but no, they had to try and make up their losses and made them "Value Added" products, and suffered the consequences. The 3 month free use is just another grab for customer dollars. I'm about to leave the tight wad money grubbers relm for a service which doesn't openly allow their servers to act as relays for any top/dick or harry to use. Oh and by the way, the E-mail problems have not been fixed. T(H)elstra E-mail servers are still in trouble & they don't seem to care. It's been going on for over 3 months now. Duplicate E-mails are the norm on their servers. I know because I am still receiving the same E-mail as many as 10 times. another arrived in my intray yesterday. 2 copies of the same E-mail sent at the exact same second.

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I would love to take up BP's o ...Roy Clark -- 31/10/03

I would love to take up BP's offer of free spam and virus protection, however, I am unable to complete the forms to obtain the software.

There two pages of forms to fill in. The first one is OK. Instead of giving an ABN number - since i don't have one - there is provision to put in your age. The second page asks much the same info, but does not have the option to give age instead of ABN. When you can't put in an ABN the whole process stops.

I sent an e-mail complaint abot this and receives a phone call from one of Ziggi's underlings telling me :" theCEO had asked him to phone me and fix the problem". He wasn't able to fix it and his technician couldn't fix it and bothe eventually left me and I haven't heard any more for over a week! I am not happy.

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From Bigpond FAQ's: http://big ...Anonymous -- 31/10/03

From Bigpond FAQ's: http://bigpond.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/bigpond.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=fW7Db9Xg&p_lva=&p_faqid=1357&p_created=1066275412&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MjQzJnBfcHJvZF9sdmwxPTEmcF9wYWdlPTE*&p_li=

"Why don’t you give the security software away free permanently?

This software is licensed by BigPond and we must pay fees to use it. We would rather offer it for free for 3 months, than add it to the price of access. We don't know of any Australian ISP which permanently provides a full set of security products free.

So, how come then can TPG provide 2 of the 3 free products. There, I know of another AUSTRALIAN ISP that offers - Telstra knows it well but they don't care.

My mobile has gone to Optus from Telstra this year. Next year, will be the year of the ADSL - yep you guessed it Telstra, I am jumping ships !

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who is designing bigpond's ema ...Anonymous -- 01/11/03

who is designing bigpond's email architecture? all this spam/viruses should be blocked by their MTAs... it's a joke...

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I'd guess that most of Bigpong ...Anonymous -- 01/11/03

I'd guess that most of Bigpong's alleged "massive increase" in virus/spam traffic is probably generated from within the Bigpong broadband network itself and that it could have been avoided by filtering virus infected emails and appropriate network traffic in the first place.

But they were too keen to make money from their filtering "product" to introduce free filtering, and as a result all their customers had to suffer.

If they had forgone the profits from re-selling spam and virus filtering as a product and introduced it free instead, they would have saved a $25M refund for a start. They might also have avoided getting a well-deserved reputation for incompetence and dishonesty.

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