A spokeswoman for the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman told ZDNet Australia the office had received in excess of 80 and probably more than 100 complaints relating to BigPond service levels and had sent a letter to Telstra asking it how it planned to handle the matter.
The issue was also discussed at a meeting between the TIO and Telstra yesterday.
The TIO spokeswoman said service issues involving other Internet service providers -- including OzEmail and OptusNet -- would also be investigated, although the TIO had not sent them letters. While the TIO had received complaints about OzEmail and OptusNet services, they were nowhere near the volume of complaints received about BigPond services.
Some Australian Internet providers, including OzEmail, OptusNet, Primus and Internode have publicly stated that they have not been affected to nearly the same extent as BigPond. A Telstra statement on the issue said its e-mail traffic surge was "consistent with the experience of other major Internet service providers".
The spokeswoman said the TIO believed a rebate of residential customer access fees to affected BigPond users was in order, while she also indicated the TIO expected to receive complaints from small businesses who believed they had suffered economic loss due to the service problems.
The TIO, which views its role primarily as to deliver a complaints resolution service, nonetheless has the power to award compensation of AU$10,000 and recommend a payment of up to AU$50,000 to affected small businesses. The TIO has the power to make an award to small businesses for economic loss, but its power in regard to residential usage is limited to ordering a rebate of access fees. It has not done so officially yet, but has provided BigPond with an informal indication that it feels this arould be appropriate.
The TIO spokeswoman stressed that small business owners would have to provide evidence that their disrupted service was used primarily for business purposes rather than personal use.
She said rather than tackle individual complaints, the TIO may adopt a systemic approach based on dealing with one complaint in each category -- for example, dealing with one complaint related to claimed e-mail delays, one relating to denial of service and so on. The outcome of those dealings would form test cases for the payment of compensation to those suffering similar problems.
Telstra is presently addressing complaints on an individual basis and is known to have been delivering rebates to customers. One small business manager said he had received a 50 percent rebate on his October BigPond Internet bill after reading Telstra's acknowledgment on ZDNet Australia that it was looking at individual customer problems.
Lindsay Tanner, the federal opposition's communications spokesman, told ABC-TV's 7:30 Report last night "It seems that Telstra's e-mail service is now about as fast as [a] carrier pigeon and not quite as reliable".
Telstra's BigPond boss, Justin Milne, conceded on the program that "...all of our customers have been receiving e-mail delays of one type or another".
Milne described the issue -- which saw e-mail volumes skyrocket from a regular volume of around 8.5 million per day to 13 million due, the carrier claims, to a spam-generating worm -- as "terrifying" and "frightening".
However, he said the problem -- which has seen e-mails delayed by several delays -- was a "brown-out" rather than a black-out, with the service running slower rather than collapsing or failing.
I want an automatic rebate. Why should I have to waste my time ringing up Telstra, waiting on hold, to justify a rebate for the effects THEIR service outage.
You can argue about the definition of an "outage" but there were and still are, numerous problems with BigPond services, not limited to email, but also including intermittent problems with authentication (500: server errors).