Telstra is blaming an overseas service provider for a string of outages that stopped BigPond broadband customers from accessing the Internet four times in as many days.
The latest blackout, due to firewall equipment failure, hit customers for almost two hours yesterday morning and followed a catastrophic weekend in which a string of hardware faults hit the domestic network on Friday and Sunday.
An undersea cable failure also hit Telstra customers attempting to access international sites on Friday night.
The telco claims to have had a "breakthrough" in tracing the root of the problem to an overseas service provider.
"We have been frustrated by attempts to understand why hardware issues on the BigPond broadband network have continued," Telstra representative Kerrina Lawrence told ZDNet.
"We believe slowing response times might be traced to an overseas service provider's server," she added.
Cable failure
However, Telstra admitted that slow international Web access was a "dual issue" linked with the undersea China-US cable failure, which struck at 11.30pm on Friday. Telstra still hasn't established the cause of the problem and has yet to rule out that it has been physically cut.
"It's not as if service has ground to a halt," Lawrence said. "Customers are still able to access the domestic service but will experience a slow response time when visiting international sites."
"Customers who heard about the Friday night cable failure probably think that reduced response time to international sites is because of that, but it's a dual issue and international response times are reduced because of placing this with an overseas service provider," she said.
Telstra is "looking at ways to accommodate" customers who are lodging complaints about the erratic broadband service, according to Lawrence.
A clause in the ADSL contract says: "Telstra does not automatically provide compensation in situations where the product does not satisfy customer's expectations."
"However, we recognise that in this instance some customers will want to lodge a complaint and we'll assist them with that," Lawrence said.
Ombudsman watching
The Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman (TIO) says it's looking at customer complaints about Telstra's broadband network on a "case-by-case" basis.
Under commercial law, Telstra is not required to set a definite download limit for users.
"Telstra doesn't guarantee [download] speeds," the TIO said. But Telstra does advertise certain speeds and "users have entered into a contract with Telstra on the basis of those advertised speeds."
"Telstra has promised a very high quality service and on that basis people can reasonably expect to receive a high-quality service."
Telstra said it supported the TIO's response.
"We'd like to provide customers with a high-quality broadband service and we're committed to doing that," Lawrence said.
"But customers have to understand that from time-to-time, technical issues will have to be ironed out and identified."
"We ask customers to be patient so we can finally determine the root cause of the problem."
The TIO said if it received an increased number of complaints about the service not living up to expectations, and it proved to be an on-going and systemic problem, "we'd have to consider referring it to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission".
OWN UP TO IT !!
Geeeeeeeeeez, smaller local ISP always blame Telstra when they have a problem. ie "its not us, its Telstra's feed to us." Each and every single time, Telstra responds with "its not our end, it must be a fault at XXXX ISP."
Well, now Telstra have faults and are blaming their upstream provider. Geee, I wonder where the problem really is. If we go by Telstra's own comments, it is more likey with themselves, and they are ironically blaming their upstream feeds.
Do they comments sounds familiar? Now they are on the recieving end and have their own problems. I'm a Telstra cable user, and I wouldn't survive without my trust small ISP 56k dial up connection. I end up using that more often than the Telstra cable its so unreliable.
Nick Hently.
IT Super Guru