Dingo Blue claims it has closed capacity on its network where it is no longer required and has put recent congestion down to this week's redeployment of dial ports and school holiday demand.

ZDNet Australia has received complaints from users of the Dingo Blue dial-up network, who claim they have been receiving busy signals all day long -- in many situations since the start of the week.

-I know for a fact that services have been reduced at many POPs (points of presence) and staff have been told to say they don't have access to this information and report to customers that it's merely congestion due to holidays," one angry user, who wished to remain anonymous, told ZDNet Australia.

-If they're reducing services, especially to the point where users can't actually log on to the Internet all day long, I would have thought they would be obligated to tell the truth."

However, Dingo Blue steadfastly denies it has cut available incoming modem lines on a large number of dial-up POPs as part of cost-cutting measures which follow hot on the heels of its recent major restructure which saw up to 25 staff shown the door. The Internet Service Provider sustains that congestion this week is due to an ongoing rationalisation of excess capacity compounded with peak holiday traffic.

"We haven't cut the number of incoming lines," Dingo Blue's group manager, consumer products, Shane Martin told ZDNet Australia. -What we've done over the last couple of months is rationalise and redeploy port capacity across the entire network of 48 POPs."

Martin exemplified this by saying if there were 5000 ports in Melbourne and only 4000 being used and 5000 ports in Sydney where 5200 were needed, Dingo Blue would transfer some un-used ports from Melbourne to Sydney to meet customer demand.

Martin admitted that some capacity had been closed but it was where it was no longer required.

-It's like driving a car on a six-lane freeway in the middle of the night - we've just closed some lanes," Martin said. However, -At peak times some congestion will occur," he added. -As a dial IP provider we don't guarantee [Internet] access in peak periods."

Martin said the ISP will continue network rationalisation -as user requirements dictate".

In other news, Dingo Blue has now admitted that a segment of its customer base was affected by the mass email destruction that impacted OptusNet subscribers with usernames from A through to C, reported by ZDNet Australia earlier this week.

Dingo Blue uses Optus's dial-up network and at first denied its customers had been impacted by the email wipeout, but today said: "A segment of Dingo Blue's customer base has been affected due to technical difficulties experienced with our network provider's e-mail platform. Specifically, customers with user names beginning with the letters A through to C have experienced loss of e-mails sent and received prior to 1 October."

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