Telstra's beleaguered broadband network has been hammered again, this time by four separate mishaps in the space of three days - including an undersea cable failure.

The first setback, which occurred at about 3.30pm Friday, was an ADSL hardware fault that hit metropolitan Melbourne - resulting in slow response times for customers accessing the Internet.

Two hours later and hot on the heels of the glitch, a hardware fault hit Sydney BigPond broadband customers, as well as cable and ADSL users - again significantly slowing down Web response times.

Both issues hit Telstra's domestic network and were solved by around 8.30 that night, only to be supervened by an undersea cable failure three hours later.

All international Web traffic was crippled by the cut.

"Customers will experience slower response time than usual until the issue is cleared," Telstra representative Kerrina Lawrence told ZDNet.

The failure struck a China-US cable, 105km from Chong Ming. Telstra has an interest in the pipe. The cable repair ship "Seguro" has been assigned to tackle the problem this week, according to Telstra.

To cap off the bout of bad luck, a separate network fault struck on Sunday.

The problem was resolved by 3.30pm that day, according to Lawrence.

Earlier failures
The weekend's most recent problems follow a handful of failures that occurred on the network at the beginning of the month, including an authentication error with ADSL connections Queensland-wide, which lasted for about eight hours.

"Unfortunately there have been issues lately that have frustrated our ADSL customers and over the weekend this extended to cable customers," Lawrence said.

"The net affect over the weekend is that while we were able to clear many issues, there are residual issues in slow response time," she added. "We're working around the clock to remove all customer impacting issues."

Telstra claims to be working with a number of suppliers to eliminate remaining customer problems.

Compensation?
The telco giant does not have a policy to reimburse customers who claim to have been adversely affected by inadequate ADSL services, but said it would look at complaints on a case-by-case basis.

Customers hit by the weekend's consecutive shortfalls are encouraged to ring Telstra's helpdesk - 13 12 82 - to discuss compensation claims.

"Any customer who believes they have been inconvenienced or impacted by the slow response times over the weekend should put any concern to the helpdesk," Lawrence said.

"We do listen on that front but there's no blanket policy to apply," Lawrence added. "It's up to the discretion of the helpdesk."

With 45,000 cable customers and half a million dial-up customers, Telstra declined to reveal how many ADSL customers it has or how many were affected by the weekend accidents, saying only that it had a "healthy and growing subscriber base".

"It's reasonable and conclusive to say that many customers would have experienced problems," Lawrence said.

However, Lawrence stressed: "this is a six-month old network and from time to time it will present us with some hardware and software problems."

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