Telstra's broadband service hit the news again this week following a 13-hour wipe-out which prevented BigPond Cable and ADSL customers accessing the most basic of Internet services -- email.
"It's a hell of an ask to be without services for that length of time...when you don't know when your service is going to be restored," XYZed's Kristin Meagher told ZDNet. "That's more than a day's trade lost [to small businesses]."
With Telstra, "you get what you pay for some of the time but not all the time," and many small businesses "can't rely on that availability of service," she added.
Telstra's product is priced and built for the residential market and because of that it hasn't built into it the type of service level guarantees XYZed has, according to Meagher.
XYZed claims that its products -- aimed at the business market -- come with guaranteed service availability.
The customer chooses either a four-hour, 12-hour or 24-hour service restoration period and financial penalties kick in if the company doesn't restore the service in the time specified.
"We put our money where our mouth is and incur financial penalties for non-performance," Ian Kelly, XYZed's GM of strategy and business development, said.
"This constitutes a vast difference between what XYZed provides and what resellers of Telstra's network provide," he added.
According to Kelly, Telstra's problem is that it built its product for the residential market and then sold it into the business market -- where outages of this kind are not acceptable.
"I seem to recall [Telstra's] had a few of these faults that go on for a long period of time," Kelly said.
ZDNet can confirm that a string of outages prevented BigPond broadband customers from accessing the Internet four times in as many days back in March.
Telstra confirmed that it does not provide a commitment of service to customers.
"It's best efforts," a Telstra representative told ZDNet. "To provide a quality of service guarantee is difficult," he added.
Telstra was unable to estimate how many small businesses were affected by the weekend's outage and in order to claim compensation they would have to "give evidence of material loss".
XYZed claims it hasn't incurred any penalties yet.
"I would like to say it's because we haven't had any outages," Kelly said. "But its because we've been able to fix the faults within the time we've committed to."
The problem is also with Telstra's backbone.. they have no redundancy. Their ISDN and ADSL were out today!
It's unfortunate that they are a company now only comitted to raising share value and not working telecom and internet products.
Contact your member of parliament - becuase we still own 51% being the major shareholder. I'd rather see better service than a few extra cents profit.