« Big Pond ignores smaller fish | Main | A dramatic kick-along for podcasting »
July 01, 2005
Telstra's wholesale abuses
Since yesterday's article about Matthew's problems getting an ADSL service out of anyone but Telstra, we've had several emails about people who've had similar difficulties.
A former employee of a Telstra competitor who now, ironically, works for Telstra, gave us some interesting details: Before he left, 12 months ago, for instance, when a customer requested an in-place landline connection, it took two full working days to add the details into the wholesale provisioning front-end system called LOLO, which sets the exchange to automatically do the work. LOLO, surprise, surprise, wasn't operational for 30 per cent of the day due to outages.
Contrast that with the fact that a Telstra Retail customer can call and get their in-place connected within two hours. "And," he remarked, "they say that there is no anti-competitive nature there at all."
He found the attitude of Telstra Wholesale completely frustrating.
"It was like we were little kid at the supermarket asking our parents to buy as some lollies. When you asked something of them, the responses were either 'Sorry, we don't have the info available to us,' or they'd have some processes in place which took two weeks to get the information. The information would be needed straight away and by the time the two weeks came, it wasn't required."
Oh well, it's probably because they can't afford to buy reliable computer systems.
And someone sent us a link to their blog which provides a "central point to vent frustrations with Telstra".
Posted by cw at July 1, 2005 11:06 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bleedingedge.com.au/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/660
Comments
The government can't/won't make Telstra behave when it owns it. How good will the regulation be when Telstra is a fully private psyhopathic company that can also freely provide donations to parties?
Posted by: tflip at July 1, 2005 04:49 PM
And it doesn't stop there. Telstras reporting systems on their website are seemingly incorrect too. I'm currently stationed on RIM DA011 (see webpage), which according to Telstras wholesale website is "upgraded" for ADSL (it appeared as completed on the 6th April 2005). I then applied a while later (was waiting for it to appear on the Capacity report, it still hasn't) and was rejected with "No Network Build will proceed at this time".
I'm still trying to find out what has happened (Telstra email me saying "I'll get back to you in a few days" and don't). The best one was when I rang Telstra to ask about it, they stated they would only tell me if I applied through Big Pond. They got really stroppy when I told them I didn't have an ISP (yeah it was a lie, but I didn't have an ADSL ISP as I get rejected!!!)
After the sale it's only going to get worse, if only a wireless ISP would come to SA (I cant get cable as there isn't any, also been told the RIM isn't ISDN compatible).
Posted by: Nigel Percy at July 4, 2005 12:51 PM
After my dialup service "died" due to Telstra's pair gains system, iprimus attempted to get me an ADSL essential line. Surprisingly this was done within 20 days, BUT then none of the modems that iprimus sent me (even a pretested one)would work.
After eliminating any potential computer and internal phone wiring issues, the modem still would not work. However, the modems that Telstra techs use to test adsl connections work fine. I tried friends modems that work fine at their home address, but they would not work at my place.I tried using the pretested modem at my friends home and it worked fine.
The only conclusion that I can come to, is that Telstra have provisioned the line so that only their equipment will sync in.
Posted by: Robyn at July 5, 2005 12:34 PM