Broadband provider iPrimus wants to move at least one of its customers off Telstra's ADSL backbone.
iPrimus general manager Ash Chopra said it would offer to move ADSL customer, Caritas Australia, onto its own network infrastructure after the customer was left without service for nearly two days last week.
During the outage iPrimus corporate support representatives alleged that Caritas' problems were due to a problem at Telstra's Kent Street ADSL exchange.
After reinvestigating the outage, iPrimus now believes Caritas' problem was "not part of the overall outage at the Kent Street exchange".
Chopra alleges that problems at the Kent Street exchange forced all of its ADSL customers offline for around two to three hours last Monday. According to Shopra, Caritas was the only customer site that remained without service after the problem was rectified.
Last Friday ZDNet Australia reported that iPrimus' corporate technical support had told Caritas that a number of its customer's sites were affected by the outage. It is now unclear which customers the support staff were referring to--those who went offline during the alleged Kent Street outage, or a group which may have been experiencing similar problems to Caritas.
"No-one has had the same issue as this particular customer to our knowledge," said Chopra.
The details of the outage remain unclear. Chopra was unable to explain to ZDNet Australia how Caritas was left offline 40 hours longer than other sites, or how service to Caritas was restored.
Chopra claims iPrimus support staff contacted Telstra's helpdesk last week to inform them of Caritas' predicament. According to Shopra, iPrimus staff were unaware that Caritas was back online until Friday, 24 hours after the service was restored.
"We don't have the details of how they fixed it," said Chopra.
Nor do Telstra. After carrying out investigations at its end, the telco is standing by its response last week, adding nothing to comments made by Telstra Wholesale public affairs manager, Graeme Salt on Friday.
"Telstra's investigations show that the Kent Street exchange is working well," he told ZDNet Australia. "Furthermore, we have had no complaints from the iPrimus official channels."
Chopra believes the problem may relate to Telstra hardware that Caritas uses to access the ADSL service.
"We can freely move [Caritas] to our own DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer) if we have the availability," he said.
iPrimus currently has 35 customer access points fitted out with its own infrastructure in Sydney, serving the CBD and adjacent suburbs. It plans to increase this to 50 in the near future.
Chopra, who has experience with DSL services around the world, said that Australia's ADSL rollout is the most unstable he has ever seen.
"The provisioning of the service has been fast, but the product is so unstable," he said.
However, Chopra left some hope for customers that are still using Telstra's ADSL service.
"I'm not here to bag Telstra," he said. "They've invested a lot of money and time into solving these problems."
"It's something that I would hope gets fixed and stabilised in the next two to three months."
I don't hold much hope for Mr Chopra's optimistic expectations that T(H)estra will ever get it RIGHT. Its been an almost TOTAL disaster since its inception.
I've been a forced user (no cable or Optus & never will be in my street. Less than 1Km from the exchange & less than 5Km from the CBD) of ADSL for almost 18 months. Reliability has been abysmal. Unscheduled interruptions, constant upgrade interruptions, no apology from
T(H)elstra, email server outages, thruput like molasses on a cold day and the list goes on & on & on!
A service from our major phone company that demonstrates what happens when a monopoly has control of a National Service.