For those who haven't seen it -- those who plan to should stop reading now -- the movie follows the travails of a group of survivors of a devastating virus that turns its victims into enraged, red-eyed, blood-vomiting killers.
The small group travels out of a devastated London in an attempt to survive, but run into even tougher and more volatile situations.
Telstra BigPond executives must feel like that embattled group of survivors right now.
Certainly the more extreme reactions of some of its users and some media commentators to the e-mail service "brown-out" -- and some of Telstra's comments about it -- over the past few weeks mirrors that of the movie's Infected.
Telstra chief executive, Ziggy Switkowski, really fired people up with his remarks about BigPond's "honesty and transparency" over the issue tightening the telecommunications company's bond with its customers.
Several commentators have questioned whether the Swen spam-generating virus was really the culprit as claimed by Telstra, or indeed whether the telecommunications heavyweight really does know what is going on. Others have questioned why BigPond's mail servers were not protected against such an assault.
While the carrier has prescribed an AU$25 million injection of two weeks' free e-mail access -- combined with the offer of a free three-month trial of anti-virus, anti-spam and firewall products -- as a cure to the problem for residential users, the full price it will pay remains uncertain. Both the carrier and the independent telecommunications industry mediator will be assessing over coming weeks claims for economic loss on behalf of small businesses as a result of the outage.
The mediator, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, has, however, signalled that should the e-mail problems continue, Telstra should revisit its existing residential compensation plans. Some users have said so far they have experienced e-mail delays of several days. While Telstra believes it won't suffer significant customer churn as a result of the difficulties, other Internet service providers have made several offers designed to lure disaffected customers away.
If e-mails sent to and from BigPond customers continue to linger in cyberspace rather than hit their destinations promptly, the number of BigPond 'rage' victims is likely to spread almost as quickly as in the movie.
i have many friends who use big pond i am still waiting for this problem with its email to be fixed....when will this brown out be fixed...their pretty darn quick at sending bills..but not fixing problems