Telstra remains confident customers will not abandon its stricken Internet service provider BigPond, despite difficulties for its 1.5 million users dragging into a third week.
The onset of the Swen virus has crippled Australia's biggest Internet service provider in recent weeks, with some emails delayed by up to 48 hours.
While a widely-touted class action has so far failed to materialise, Telstra last Friday announced AU$25 million worth of rebates for e-mail service delays.
Some analysts have predicted Telstra could lose market share in both the residential and key small to medium enterprise (SME) sectors as a result of the problems at BigPond.
But chief executive Ziggy Switkowski said today that no sign of customers shifting to other internet providers, or churn, had been detected by the company, with brand loyalty a major factor when considering Telstra customers.
"We have not seen any churn yet and maybe that's not surprising," Dr Switkowski told an analysts briefing.
"Certainly, we've seen -- over this two week period -- a growing number of customer complaints and calls, which have now stopped, and that has got to be a leading indicator of customer frustration. "But our experience with Telstra customers is that we have quite a large deposit of trust there with them, providing that we can recover from the issues."
Dr Switkowski said last Friday the company would also provide customers with virus and spam filters and personal firewall software free of charge for three months.
He said the Swen virus had generated a 20 to 30 per cent increase in traffic on its networks in the past few weeks, with all of its e-mail customers affected by a slower service.
But by today, Dr Switkowski said today the service was retuning to normal.
"I'm determined to completely remediate the situation and ensure that we avoid difficulties such as this again in the future," he said.
"We have 33 out of 34 mail stores operating at 70 per cent or less load, which means we have now added substantial capacity headroom even as we are continuing to operate with much higher current levels of traffic."
Dr Switkowski said that all new e-mails were now "flowing normally" and levels of customer complaints to call centres were back to their usual levels.
"The residual customer concerns are now focusing upon old e-mails which are now circulating somewhere between various cyberspace relays," he said.
"These e-mails will be progressively delivered in the days ahead."
© 2003 Australian Associated Press Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors. This is the ZDNet Australia TM service with content provided by AAP. AAP reserves all rights, including copyright, in services provided by it. The information, text and images in the service are for personal use only and may not be re-written, copied, re-sold or re-distributed, framed, linked or otherwise used whether for compensation of any kind or not, without the prior written permission of AAP.
This service is published for information only without assuming a duty of care. AAP is not in the business of providing professional advice, and gives no warranty, guarantee or other representation about the accuracy of the information or images contained in this service. AAP is not liable for errors, omissions in, delays or interruptions to or cessation of the services through negligence or otherwise.
The globe symbol and -AAP" are registered trade marks.
Why would customers stick with BigPond? Look at the list of PLANNED outages:
http://telstra.com/servicestatus/status.asp?product=5&productname=BigPondBroadbandADSL
This is the list of problems that Telstra KNOW will occur in the future...who knows how many further 'unplanned' outages might hit their system...they're rubbish...avoid at all cost!