Telstra had planned to upgrade exchanges in Blacktown, Casino and Eagle Vale between midnight and 8am on Monday morning. However, the upgrade ran over schedule, and Telstra received a number of complaints from customers unable to access their service in those areas, a spokesperson for its BigPond Internet division said.
Another consequence of the upgrade was that customers in other areas were also experiencing difficulties in browsing Web sites. Telstra placed a separate notice on its service support site noting that "customers in New South Wales may be having difficulty downloading data from the Internet" at 10:14am.
When the site was updated at 7:00am on Tuesday morning, that disruption notice was still in place. Around 8:00am Tuesday, Telstra replaced the notice with one stating that the problem had been resolved at 4:00pm the previous day.
The difference in times could prove critical to customers hoping to receive a rebate for disrupted service under Telstra's ADSL Customer Service Level Guarantee. The six-hour outage implied by Telstra's postings would not fall below the 99 per cent threshold required for a rebate, but the 22 hours between the original notice and the posting of the updated message would qualify customers for a 10 per cent rebate on monthly fees.
Telstra calculates the rebates automatically based on customer records, the BigPond spokesperson said, adding that Telstra would investigate why there had been a delay between fixing the problem and posting that information.
Casino is in Far Northern NSW..... not exactly "Sydney"