Even -die hard" Telstra business customers have had enough of more than a week's worth of ADSL woes in Victoria, which has seen the delivery of an emaciated service, including a seven-hour outage, the shock waves from which are still being felt.

Victorian users have been hounded by ADSL hang-ups since last Friday, when the first outages of 40 minutes and 30 minutes hit home. Monday of this week saw a 50-minute outage and a 25-minute outage and intermittent services continued on Tuesday. On Wednesday, a further outage commenced at 3pm, taking 70 percent of Victorian users off air, and lasted up to seven hours for some. The telco giant's overzealous announcement yesterday that services had been fully restored was retracted when problems were found to be continuing for an unknown number of users.

Victoria-based software developer Thompson Data Corporation said business had been -severely impacted" by the week's continuing blackouts. The company distributes software products to clients electronically, does most of its banking online and is constantly booking flights for staff travelling interstate over the Internet.

-We're one of those die-hard supporters of Telstra but it gets to the point where you're sick of it," Thompson Data Corp's technical support manager Geoff Craig told ZDNet Australia.

According to Craig, the company has an internal ADSL business plan which consists of two 1.5MG lines, courtesy of Telstra. -Both have been down all week and some of last week," Craig said, adding that despite Telstra's claims that Wednesday's blackout began at 3pm, the business hadn't had ADSL for most of the day. -We're very disappointed with it," he said.

A BigPond Direct ISDN line into the company's main office was still running, however, but was proving to be a much more expensive way of doing business. -It's much more expensive and there's no DNS resolution out of Australia," Craig said, explaining that employees were having difficulty surfing international sites.

-It gets to the point where you maybe look at going somewhere else," he said.

Victoria's Lending Technology Services, a software applications provider and technical advisor to companies that don't have that expertise in-house, has also suffered the repercussions of Telstra's dodgy ADSL service.

Chief technology officer Charles Meo said ADSL has been down every day this week for at an least an hour, not to mention the seven-hour outage of Wednesday. -It's absolutely shocking," he said. -For me personally, I've spent a lot of time and effort persuading customers to go with ADSL and it's all blown up in my face."

-We deal with a lot of businesses who don't have the kind of margins where they can just afford to laugh off a network outage," Meo added. -People's businesses, including the one I work for, are on the line here, but their [Telstra's] standard tactic seems to be ignore everyone's complaints."

Meo said the company would be falling back to ISDN. -It's the only safe bet," he said, although he admitted it was a much more expensive alternative.

Telstra claims the fault lies in a software problem and denies the service intermittence at the week's start is related to the problems that commenced Wednesday.

The telco heavyweight's standard response to questions over compensation is that it looks at claims on a case-by-case basis.

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