BigPond newsgroup: 10 days of utter silence - News

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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BigPond newsgroup: 10 days of utter silence

By Megan McAuliffe, ZDNet Australia
August 14, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/BigPond-newsgroup-10-days-of-utter-silence/0,139023165,120254383,00.htm

Telstra's BigPond news service has suffered a technical glitch lasting 10 days, which the Australian telco chose to push to the back of its long list of things to fix, leaving its dial-up customers out of the loop.

Users of the newsgroup service, which is hosted on Telstra's BigPond site, were not able to view external news postings since August 4. The service was semi-operative, allowing BigPond users to read internal postings, however, the flow between Telstra customers and other ISPs had completely stalled.

Although the glitch occured earlier this month, the telco had not informed users of the problem on its service status page http://www.telstra.com/ServiceStatus/ until last night.

Telstra's Kerrina Lawrence said the telco had not posted a message on its status page sooner because it was treated as a low priority in light of all the problems the network has been experiencing of late.

"Only 10-15 customers enquired about the problem per day, compare that to an interruption to the service where we might get 140 calls within 30 minutes," Lawrence said.

BigPond customer Raymond Jones said technical support staff denied there was a problem for the first four days, which then turned to an admission that a problem existed to stony silence.

Jones said Telstra's excuse for not informing users of the issue, "doesn't wash, when a post on the news group service tells users to check the service status page for regular updates."

-Whether it's a low priority or not, it should be posted on the page so we know what's going on," Jones said.

The service has now been restored for dial-up customers.

Referring to the time it took for Telstra to get to the problem, Jones said, "why provide the service if they can't support it."

Jones also said its not the first time in the last three months the service has been affected.

-If a problem occurs on a Friday afternoon, Telstra won't look at it until Monday," he said.