Telstra wholesale glitch causes ISP stress

Telstra will today continue to work through a backlog of requests sent from its wholesale customers as it attempts to get up to speed after a "technical issue" caused its wholesale provisioning system to not function correctly.

Sources within internet service providers (ISP) receiving wholesale services from Telstra told ZDNet Australia that the telco had an issue with its wholesale ordering system which was delaying the provision of services for the ISPs.

Telstra confirmed to ZDNet Australia yesterday evening that it did have a problem. "We have had a technical problem with the provisioning system that links the field workforce orders with the Telstra wholesale online interface used by our customers to log orders and receive completion advices," Telstra said.

"As a result of this our wholesale customers have not been able to see if their orders have been progressing from the online interface through to completion."

When a consumer wants to order an ADSL service on a Telstra line they need to request this through their ISP. The ISP then files a job request with Telstra to provision the service by assigning a technician. The same occurs when a speed change is requested or any other change that requires a Telstra technician. It was this job request function that ISP sources said was not functioning correctly.

Telstra said orders made between 31 May and 2 June had been affected. "These orders are still being actioned by the field workforce," it said. "The field workforce is progressively working through the jobs for our wholesale customers and they expect to be up-to-date by [Friday] afternoon."

The problem had been resolved, according to the telco, which was now "clearing the backlog". Wholesale customers would be notified when their jobs were completed, according to the Telstra statement.

The technical problem was "not related to any system changes", Telstra said, and was "a technical issue with the provisioning system that link the orders to the field workforce".

Yet according to one ISP source, the problem had occurred after Telstra introduced its trial "Naked DSL" and "Pure DSL" products into its wholesale ordering system.

Telstra denied this to be the case. "[Telstra] can definitely rule out any link there," it said.

The ISP source said that there were lengthy delays occurring when provisioning services.

"We've had customers ... that are four or five days over their [service's estimated time of arrival] because [Telstra's] job logging database is completely and utterly rooted," the source said. "Telstra don't know what jobs have been completed or what jobs haven't been completed."

Some issues began Monday last week, the ISP source said, which was when they believed Telstra had begun migrating its provisioning database to a new system.

The source said it affected the database Telstra used, among other things, to monitor and run service qualifications on customers, and to log jobs. The source said Telstra couldn't guarantee whether it had received job requests, whether it was passing them on to its field technicians, or whether a technician had completed the request.

A fix had been deployed, the source said, which involved Telstra calling ISPs every time it had processed an order. According to the source, this process was normally automated.

Internode, a Telstra customer, declined to comment. iiNet's chief technology officer, Greg Bader, another Telstra customer, confirmed that the ISP had been affected by the technical issue, but said that it would have no major impact on customers.