Two complaints brought before the Ombudsman, involving aspects of Telstra's ADSL service, have been selected as test cases to help the agency form views on regulating Internet services. In doing so, it wants to determine the performance of Telstra's service level agreement (SLA), introduced this month, in key areas such as service disruption, billing and usage metering.
The Ombudsman's study coincides with the continuous appearance of widespread technical glitches in Telstra's ADSL service. Last week Southern NSW users felt the most serious impact of a network outage that affected its customers in four states. On Tuesday Telstra's woes continued, with its status report Web site indicating pockets of suburban Sydney and the Central Coast were without service for four hours.
Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) John Pinnock said one of test cases attracts scrutiny to the use of the term 'network availability' in the Telstra's agreement rather than 'service availability'.
"We wonder just what that means and what limitations it might impose on the breadth of the guarantee and hence its worth," Pinnock told ZDNet Australia.
The test will also touch upon the manner that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) report outages to their customers. Pinnock said that the Telstra's guarantee does not deal with "down-time" that is said to be because of network upgrades.
Whilst Pinnock did not accuse ISPs of using misleading terms when reporting outages to evade accountability proscribed by their SLAs, he indicated he was aware of customer concerns that the practice might be taking place.
"I'm certainly aware that there are others who have suggested that some of the providers are using scheduled upgrades as a way of hiding outages that are beyond their control," he said.
"If we ever came across hard evidence of that, we'd investigate like lightening," he added later.
Examples of the fine line ISPs use to delineate between terms they use to explain apparent outages are easy to find.
On Tuesday, OzEmail users were unable to retrieve e-mail from the ISP's mail servers for two hours. OzEmail's public affairs manager doggedly avoided referring to the incident as an outage. He described the event as a "delay" as customers could still authenticate with the mail server (if not actually retrieve their e-mail).
The TIO hasn't formed a formal view on whether Telstra's guarantee should or should not incorporate scheduled network upgrades, as the advisory body doesn't have a pre-existing conceptual telecommunications model to judge the situation.
Redundancy features in more mature and robust voice telecommunications networks can be upgraded and repaired in real-time without any appreciable effect on service levels, said Pinnock.
"On the one it is an advance to have such agreements on the other and, as far as we can see, [they're] very limited," he said.
The TIO has given no time frame in which it will make its findings, which would apply to all ISPs, public.
No mention of the outages in Victoria. Since last Friday we have had over 12 hours of outages and 2 of them I had to report to Telstra as they said they didn't know.
If Telstra don't include us in the rebate the TIO will be getting a complaint from our office with log files, conversation records and a bill to pass onto Telstra for us having to tell them thier network is doen (or is that "upgraded").