ZDNet Australia first reported the fault , which prevents some BigPond ADSL customers in the same geographical area and with 144 in their IP addresses from being able to communicate in a peer-to-peer (P2P) connection, early December.
Telstra deployed a software fix to affected routers in Melbourne on December 12, which it claimed corrected the flaw in Victoria, South Australia, Northern Territories, Tasmania and Western Australia. At the same time the telco giant claimed to be overseeing the testing of a solution for NSW, Queensland and ACT with the upgrade scheduled for the following week.
However, Telstra now concedes that peer-to-peer connections won't be fully restored until as late as January 20 in NSW and ACT, with the bug expected to be ironed out in Queensland by January 11.
"We hoped to have the router upgrade by Christmas, that was our best estimate of when testing would be completed," a Telstra spokesperson told ZDNet Australia today. According to the spokesperson, new software was installed but technicians encountered some problems that required further testing to -ensure the software works okay with the rest of the network".
Affected users are not so sure that Telstra is as dedicated to pushing 144 fixes as it claims to be. -In the grand picture, the 144.* is low priority... DNS and mail issues that affect 100 percent of customers are much higher on the list. Routers that can be taken off line, by little more than a puff of IP packets from a 14k4 modem, are also a greater priority as this also impacts 100 percent of customers," one ZDNet reader and dissatisfied BigPond user said.
In previous discussions with ZDNet Australia, Telstra admitted that as it had only been a handful of calls a week from affected customers the issue was tagged as a -low-fault impact" and for this reason it hadn't seen fit to highlight the problem on its service status page.
Given that a fix is still weeks away, P2P connectivity issues have since been added to Telstra's service status Web page.
According to the spokesperson, the software fix is working well in Victoria and related areas. -As far as I'm aware there are no problems there," he said, adding that the same solution couldn't be deployed countrywide due to different network configurations.
Who do Telstra have administering their network ...Hummphrey B Bear?