The CEPU claims the CSG benchmark statistic do not fully reflect problems facing rural and regional customers. It also claims the CSG statistics are being aided cosmetically by maintenance practices that gloss over a large number of faults in Telstra's PSTN network.
The union has submitted its stinging critique of Telstra's maintenance regime to the Senate telecommunications inquiry, directly challenging the final report of the just-completed Estens Inquiry.
The submission's author, Roz Easons, said the CSG statistics do not fully reflect problems facing rural and regional customers because they reflect service repair times only and ignore fault rates.
The CEPU claims that published Australian Communications Authority data shows a dramatic rise in faults in Telstra's rural telecommunications services. It said that they have increased nearly 50 percent between 1999-2000 and 2000-2001.
The union argues that Telstra has offered no explanation for the dramatic increase in fault rates
The union's claims are supported by former Network Design Construction (NDC) staff who say that Telstra has ignored thousands of equipment fault alarms.
Former NDC equipment installer and tester, Ross White, told ZDNet Australia that Telstra had simply stopped acknowledging the alarms built into its equipment to alert monitoring staff of malfunctions and impending equipment failures within its PSTN.
White, initially reluctant to speak to ZDNet Australia regarding the alarms six months ago, while still an employee of NDC, said he discovered thousands of unacknowledged alarms when he was asked to investigate a dispute over responsibility for faults in some of Telstra's ISDN class equipment.
"I investigated all of that equipment for Victoria and Tasmania for NDC -- not one of the alarms was ours, but they were all real and I had 1,400. And they were ISDN alarms, that's fairly serious stuff," said White.
According to White each ISDN alarm was potentially responsible for between 10 and 30, 64-kilobit high-traffic, high-density digital data network services, costing around $AU6,000 to lease per year before call costs.
White said the alarms are being recorded by Telstra's management system but switched off at network level as "no-one wants to know about them".
"They're not appearing on anyone's terminal but if you ask for the right alarm through Telstra's computer network you can then see them," he said.
The maintenance and monitoring apparatus applies to other Telstra equipment including its pair gain systems. The CEPU said NDC has installed some pair gain equipment without alarms due to "financial rigidities" in its contract with Telstra.
According to the union, an outage at Telstra's Kyneton exchange highlights the inadequacies in Telstra's monitoring and maintenance aparatus. It said that Telstra's failure to acknowledge alarms attached to equipment at the exchange led to the entire town, including its hospital and school, losing its service. An NDC technician sent to investigate the situation, and told to expect a cut-cable, discovered a power outage had left the exchange running on battery power for two days before collapsing. In its report the union suggests Telstra's Melbourne-based Global Operations Centre ignored repeated alarm signals generated by equipment at the exchange.
The example, said the CEPU, was a dramatic "but by no means isolated" example of diagnostic failure.
The union believes that situation is symptomatic of an overly centralised and under-resourced, "reactive" maintenance apparatus Telstra has created during its transition to full privatisation. It said the apparatus achieves Telstra short-term "statistical goals" while ignoring the network's fundamental needs. It said the apparatus that has left Telstra's network vulnerable to frequent serious outages.
The union said that Telstra has replaced experienced network analysts that manned most of its rural exchanges 10 years ago with a smaller group of less experienced network analysts located in its operations centres in Melbourne and Brisbane. Also it has rationalised specialist state based teams dedicated to handling recurrent faults.
According to CEPU figures, currently, less than 20 of 85 Telstra network analysts monitor its PSTN at any one time.
The union was particularly critical of handling of pair gain alarms reported to the Brisbane operation centre. It said the information reported by the alarms is too simple for the staff to easily identify problems with the systems.
According to White and the union, with so few resources dedicated to monitoring faults, Telstra only acknowledges the faults when they reach a critical stage and customers report them.
The strategy, said the union in its findings "helps explain the apparent paradox of improving customer service guarantee compliance figures at a time when other statistics show both fault rates and customer complaints rising and when the union's members are repeatedly testifying to the poor state of the PSTN".
The union believes that the situation has been brought about by market and political pressures placed on Telstra executives since its partial sale.
According to the union Telstra has walked on a tightrope, balancing its need to improve profits but cutting labour costs while answering to political pressure to meet service benchmarks in order to "smooth the path" to full privatisation.
"The immediate challenge thus facing [Telstra] management is to do more with less -- at least be seen to be doing more with less," wrote the union in its submission.
Actual submission is at:
http://www.cepu.asn.au/comm.cepu/submissions/reg-tel-inq.html