Despite continual problems with its BigPond service, Telstra continues to play down the extent of disruptions experienced by its Internet customers.

Last week Telstra's NSW and ACT-based ADSL customers were hit by a 12-hour outage. Earlier in the week a number of its customers were unable to access BigPond's mail servers.

Telstra retail spokesperson, Kerrina Lawrence, last week put a positive spin on the mail server outage, saying it only resulted in a loss of one quarter of the mail's functionality.

"They were able to look at their existing mail, they were able to send mail and, after repeated attempts, some customers would have been able to retrieve incoming or new mail, but no-one was actually physically disconnected," Lawrence told ZDNet Australia.

Telstra's broadband ADSL network has born more than its fair share of criticism of the BigPond service.

Depsite the continual outages, the carrier has challenged suggestions that the network is unreliable and it now believes the worst of the network's problems are behind it.

Lawrence conceded that the ADSL network had some problems initially but said that the network has been "relatively stable" since April 2001.

"In June we felt that the teething problems were sufficiently contained with the network architecture investment we were making," said Lawrence. "We felt that we were in a position to stand behind the performance of the network and that's why we introduced the Service Level Guarantee."

However, there appears to be little change in the frequency of glitches affecting BigPond's ADSL network since February last year.

Telstra's ADSL problems appeared late February 2001, soon after the network was rolled out and continued throughout the year.

In July 2001 a report by ZDNet Australia showed that the ADSL service had been down for 331 hours over a two-month period early that year. That report kicked-off a series of new reports carrying a familiar theme.

In August 2001 two outages appeared with days of each other, followed by more hiccups the following month as ADSL users were cut off from international Web sites.

The ADSL service made a poor start to 2002. Telstra blamed software bugs when its ADSL customers found themselves unable to access peer-to-peer file sharing in January and again in February when some customers were unable to log on to the ADSL network at all.

New reports of problems with the services have been appearing on an almost monthly basis since.

Following another outage in March, in April ADSL wholesale customer iPrimus appeared to be persuading its Sydney customers to continue to use the service by pledging to moving them off Telstra's network access equipment and onto its own. At the time, then iPrimus general manager Ash Chopra said the Telstra ADSL rollout was the least reliable he'd ever witnessed.

New reports of outages have appeared in recent months. Disruptions in June and July--the most serious affected customers in four states--formed rehearsals for last week's incident.

Today Victorian and Tasmanian BigPond customers were unable to access Web sites outside Telstra's domain.

Telstra's Service Level Guarantee is currently under scrutiny from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO). Telstra's TIO liaison officer has confirmed that it has received a complaint from the Ombudsman regarding its ADSL service that has "a service level aspect to it".

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