Telstra users nationwide have been experiencing slow access to International Web sites all day, a result of a fault on the Southern Cross Cable -- which connects Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii to the West Coast of the US, according to Telstra spokesperson Stuart Gray.
The hiccup is affecting the pipe between the cable station in Hillsborough, California and access to the US network, Gray said.
However, when contacted by ZDNet Australia, Southern Cross said: -There's no evidence of anything being a problem...there is no fault on the Southern Cross network". The company's Ross Peffer explained that that the Southern Cross link is a submarine cable, operating -from shore-to-shore".
"The end-to-end link concerns a lot more than just Southern Cross," he said.
Peffer said that Telstra had advised Southern Cross at about 9am today that it had a problem on its own link and requested Southern Cross check its network to see if the fault lay there. Peffer claims it didn't.
Telstra could give no estimated time of repair but said there was no packet loss and not all BigPond customers would be impacted. Those that were affected would experience slow access to international sites.
Telstra had been re-routing some Internet traffic to the Southern Cross cable following the recent damage to its SEA-ME-WE-3 cable.
Telstra LIE to customers via their Service Status page on BigPond. The service status page seems to "tone down" the facts.
When it's obvious that my ADSL is having problems I visit this page, I have noticed on several occasions where they say, "we are having problems with International surfing only, and that National surfing habits will be unaffected".
This is a load of crap. In all the times I have visited this service status page because of slowness, it's always blamed on International issues of some kind. I am only trying to connect to web servers in Queensland - I should be getting 1.5Mbps digital access - instead I have the equivalent of a 19.2Kbps modem from 1980.
In all fairness, Telstra are giving me a $50 "loyalty credit" every month, presumably until all of the problems are fixed, however I would like to pay the full price of $130/month for a fair service. I didn't sign up for $50 for crap service!