Customers question Big Pond cable 'upgrades'
Summary Description Surprise new pricing plans and ongoing performance woes have customers up in arms.
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Roullas Top10 Simon Vandore

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Editorial InformationArticle Location
Article Topic Broadband
Story Order
Story Group 000813
Post Date 08/08/2000 05:40 PM Status Posted Entered by Simon Vandore on 08/08/2000 04:42 PM


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Content
Introduction
Telstra now admits to recent problems with the Big Pond Advance (BPA) cable Internet service, but its customers refute its claims of successful repair.

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Last week a Telstra spokesperson brushed off customer concerns that parts of the premium broadband network were consistently giving lower performance than a cheaper dialup modem connection. Following Newswire's story on the problem, however, the company owned up.
"We had been aware of slow response times in Brisbane for some time," the spokesperson said in a follow-up email. "But all efforts to isolate the problem came to nothing."
"As part of the investigation it was noticed that part of the Brisbane network was carrying more traffic than the corresponding part of the Sydney network. This was investigated and it was found that in this part of the network (a datavault) in Brisbane was sharing two services. The services were separated and there was an immediate improvement in the service."
The spokesperson said response times "should now be more than twice as fast" as the previous week, promising further upgrades in Brisbane over the next month "to reduce the likelihood of the network slowing down as it has over recent weeks".
Brisbane customers of Big Pond's online gaming service Wireplay said they were told that a network upgrade occurred on August 3. But Simon Wright, owner of Australian broadband user site Whirlpool, said it appeared neither fix had any effect.
"From what I have been hearing, nobody has seen any quantifiable improvement in network speed or reliability in the last few days," Wright said. "BPA implemented an IP changeover for Brisbane customers [last Thursday]. My cynical guess is that this modification was rebadged as an 'upgrade' simply to appease media begging for a response. I doubt this problem will be fixed soon."
Several customers now claim to have contacted the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) as they are tied to 18-month contracts, but have not received the promised level of service.
A spokesperson for the TIO said the office could not reveal whether complaints about a specific company had been received. However, he said the TIO is authorised to investigate complaints regarding Big Pond Advance on a case-by-case basis in the order they are logged. Where ongoing issues with a company are uncovered, the TIO is authorised to pass matters to the Australian Consumers Association (ACA) or the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
BPA does have some happy customers. Ben Willems, a Melbourne customer, said he had been impressed with the reliability and stability of the service in the last three months. On the other hand, he believed Brisbane and Sydney customers are in a different boat.
"Fortunately for me Telstra have delivered, but it would seem that some areas of the service are in need of some attention," Willems said.
Changing the rules
Meanwhile, Big Pond has altered its cable Internet pricing plans to coincide with yesterday's release of its ADSL price structure. Bandwidth limitations of 256Kbps downstream and 64Kbps upstream have been placed on the lower-priced Blast Off plan which was previously uncapped (using all available bandwidth). Blast Off plan customers pay a penalty rate per megabyte if they transfer over 250M per month, so other customers chose the Freedom plan which offered no charge for data transferred, but capped performance at 400Kbps.
Yesterday's changes raised the Freedom downstream speed cap to 512Kbps (with 128Kbps upstream) from September 1, and a cheaper version of Freedom has been introduced with the same bandwidth caps as Blast Off.
When BPA was launched two years ago, the theoretical downstream bandwidth offered was about 10Mbps, but in practice the first customers received closer to 1Mbps. Late last year, the first caps were introduced along with an 'acceptable use' policy prohibiting the transfer of very large amounts of data and banning the type of automated transfer agents that can be set to continually download while a user sleeps.
Some customers say this defeats the purpose of a broadband connection and fails to live up to the promise of 'unlimited' transfer initially promised to those on the Freedom plan. The Blast Off plan's 250M download limit could theoretically be used in less than an hour at these speeds.
In online discussion, customers have reacted with confusion to the new price structures. Most Freedom customers were pleased to hear of their upgrade to 512Kbps downstream bandwidth, while some Blast Off customers were concerned that such a low cap had been placed on their bandwidth.
Wright questioned the wisdom of introducing two versions of the Freedom plan, one priced at $67 (for 256/64Kbps) and the other at $72.55 (for 512/128Kbps).
"People who want to save $5.55 can now do so. Whoopee!" Wright said.


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Bulletin SummaryCustomers question Big Pond cable 'upgrades'
Telstra now admits to recent problems with the Big Pond Advance (BPA) cable Internet service, but its customers refute its claims of successful repair. Last week a Telstra spokesperson brushed off customer concerns that parts of the premium broadband network were consistently giving lower performance than a cheaper dial-up modem connection. Following Newswire's story, however, the company owned up. "We had been aware of slow response times in Brisbane for some time," the spokesperson said in a follow-up email, "But all efforts to isolate the problem came to nothing." Customers are also angered by changes to their pricing plans.

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Customers question Big Pond cable 'upgrades'

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