Telstra is expanding the storage capacity of its BigPond Internet service this week, making room for what it hopes will be a 50 percent increase in its customer base.
Telstra spokesman Stuart Gray said that upgrades, scheduled for early Tuesday morning, would result in a substantial increase in the capacity of all of Telstra's BigPond messaging products.
The carrier has not yet indicated how quickly the capacity increase will be absorbed by new subscriptions, and said that the capacity upgrade is not related to problems experienced by Telstra's personal Web hosting service earlier this month, when customer sites were lost.
"Basically, over the last four years, we've seen the volume of e-mail coming through our servers double each year," said Gray. "While we don't know if it's going to double this year, certainly, it's increasing on a monthly basis".
According to Telstra, the service upgrade will impact on all products that sit on top of BigPond's messaging platform including business, home and ADSL products, and Telstra.com's Webmail service.
Customers will be able to send and receive e-mails while the upgrade is carried out, but account and password changes, as well as new user sign-ups, will not be recognised until it is complete.
The process is expected to last three hours, beginning at 1 am and finishing at 4 am Eastern Standard Time.
Telstra said that the timing of the upgrade has been chosen to minimise inconvenience for its customers.
They can barely operate their current network , heres to %50 increases....that will draw the customers in...heh.