The trials and tribulations of Telstra's ADSL users continue following a server lock-up last night that had a four and a half hour impact on services.

The server that was knocked out of action last night affected ADSL users in NSW and Victoria, who would have had problems logging in from about four o'clock until about 8.30pm.

Telstra representative Stuart Gray said the problem was entirely unrelated to last week's seven-hour outage, which shut down services due to an unspecified authentication error.

Nor was it related to a previous 13-hour wipeout of the company's entire broadband email services, which brought a wave of bad press upon the telco heavyweight at a time when it was already in the spotlight over moves to restrict broadband data downloads.

The Australian Telecommunications User Group's (ATUG) calls for Telstra to reduce customers' bills whilst problems continue have gone unheeded by Telstra.

-People have known it's a new product. It was only introduced in August last year," Gray said.

-There was an unreal expectation that it'd be 100 percent from the beginning, in reality this is a complex technology [that was] rapidly rolled out."

-Teething problems, under these circumstances, have happened to most [new] technology."

Despite stark criticism of its ADSL services of late, Telstra is optimistic that recurrent glitches are short term.

-There is every expectation that these things are short term," Gray added.

Gray said that there was a -major focus across the company" to make the platform stable over the next few months, but declined to elaborate.

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