Telstra's ADSL network has suffered a handful of outages on a national scale recently, with one customer branding the system as "incredibly frustrating".
The telco's Big Pond service suffered an outage on January 25, which lasted for more than 10 hours. The network also suffered further local and intermittent disruptions on February 21 and 22, with one outage lasting up to an hour.
"There was definitely an issue and it effected customers," a Telstra spokesperson told ZDNet.
"It was an unacceptably large outage," the spokesperson said, however corrective action has been taken to fit an alarm to a special router in order to better inform the telco if further disruptions occur.
Testra ADSL customer Leonard Gay says since the two major outages occurred there have been interruptions of ten minutes or more affecting data flow as recently as last week.
Telstra confirmed there has been intermittent local and national authentication issues, which won't allow customers to log on to the network or once they are on, experience technical issues.
"It's not satisfactory if the fault continues, we're investigating the issues," the spokesperson said.
Gay described the ADSL network as 'incredibly frustrating".
When the ADSL network is not down, "it is flaky, and you can't get through to certain servers," he said.
"You pay premium price in retail market, I like to think it would be a reliable service," Gay said.
According to the Telstra spokesperson, since the rollout of the ADSL network in April 2000, the telco has been building the network daily to improve the service. It plans to invest AU$1 billion over a five-year period.
"From time to time we will have issues but we're taking corrective action."
Telstra claims the technical issues have only effected one in several hundred customers and that they are treating is as a low-level fault.
However, "it is still of sufficient concern to some of our customers."
The spokesperson advised customers to be patient, saying that if they persist, after one or two attempts they will get through.
Bigpond Cable has also been flakey over the last week. I have seen several outages lasting sometimes several hours and one lasted over night. When speaking with Tech Support; "oh, we've been having problems on that router, it should be ok by the morning" or "I thought that router was fixed yesterday."
Nick