An Internet Service Provider start-up is ruffling feathers by establishing a cooperative group body to lobby against Telstra following claims it was put out of business after being stung by the giant telco.
The Web site, found at www.antitelstra.com , was set up at the beginning of the year to provide the means for disgruntled start-up ISPs to record their concerns and complaints against the telco heavyweight.
The site was set up "in retaliation to [Telstra's] crap service that killed my business and financially ruined us," according the site's creator Trevor Power.
"The response we've had has been mind-boggling," Power said.
Now with at least 15 other ISPs on side, Power hopes to have established the grassroots of a cooperative by the end of the week and to have instigated action against the telecommunications giant Telstra and wholesale Internet infrastructure service provider VivaNET in the next two or three weeks.
According to Power, his ISP business, no1ISP.com, flunked after just five months due to a problem in the Telstra exchange from which he ran his business.
Power claims a portion of Telstra's network was corrupt and the service was plagued with multiple errors from the date of installation - April 13, 2000.
As a result, the ISP suffered countless problems with customers not being able to log in to utilise its services, usernames and passwords were corrupt and slow connections eventually came to a stop.
Problems in Telstra's exchange were compounded by problems with the infrastructure provided by VivaNET, which were hosted on no1ISP.com's premises - problem neither Telstra nor VivaNET were able to identify, Power said.
"It was a process of elimination that went on for weeks and stretched out for months," Power said.
According to Power, Telstra troubleshooters were sent out over 30 times in four months to find the problem, spending over 100 hours on the premises, to no avail.
"We couldn't get Telstra and VivaNET to confirm the same problem," Power said. "Telstra continuously blamed our equipment."
"We couldn't provide a quality service to our customers," Power added. "We couldn't give it away at the end of the day. We exhausted our resources trying to persevere to get this problem sorted out."
Power, who claims to have been seeking compensation of AU$200,000 from Telstra and VivaNET for over 10 months, believes that "power in numbers" will prevail and cooperative action will be successful where one-on-one endeavours have failed.
"We really didn't have to try so hard to rally the support of other ISPs," said Power, who visualises the cooperative becoming the country's fourth largest ISP.
"We need to establish an identity and use it to bargain on behalf of other ISPs," Power said.
Power intends to confront VivaNET with the cooperative's figure of settlement and if this isn't accepted will pursue the matter in federal court.
Power also intends to file a motion for third-party discovery of Telstra documents in relation to his case which will give him more power to take action through the court.
"If Telstra is forced to supply them [all documentation] it'll be the sixth round of ammunition in the chamber," Power said.
Power is also pressing to go ahead with a national Telstra complaint day - a coordinated effort to call Telstra 1800 numbers in an attempt to pull down its network for a day
Both VivaNET and Telstra refused to comment.
