<soapbox alert> This might be off-topic, but I'm sure we are ALL affected by what Telstra do. There is a lot of political talk about "service to the bush" (fair enough too), but I never hear anything about the monopoly Telstra will always have over copper wire, and how that is going to play out once they are privatised.
I had an outage last night caused by a line failure.. probably caused in part by the heavy rain. My provider is a Powertel re-seller. Part of my email to my upstream provider: <snip> It seems that Telstra simply refused to do anything about the outage. Apparently they are talking about fixing it by the end of the next business day. Naturally, there MIGHT have been catastrophic circumstances, but I got the impression that it was simply a case of them not really being very interested. Are we THAT much at the mercy of Telstra? Part of his reply: ..... this is the bane of my existence. The biggest problem with any DSL services in Australia, is that Telstra still has and probably will always have complete control of the copper wiring going into everyone's homes. That said, the operational concerns that we are constantly battling with are the SLAs that Telstra put on repairing any line work. Currently the same SLA applies to DSL-related line problems as they do for residential phone services - which is (shudder) end of the next business day after the issue is logged. There is an unwillingness within Telstra to escalate these issues until after this magic time period has passed, due apparently to the high workload assigned to these engineers (and probably a Telstra mentality of "we'll do it when we are good and ready"). I have attempted to escalate by using the might of the Powertel Director of Technical Operations on some occasions in the past and even with that sort of influence, I was able only to buy a couple of hours (and sometimes not even that). I actually was in a meeting yesterday afternoon with Powertel senior management (including the MD) where I voiced my outrage at this situation. They assured me that they are negotiating with Telstra to change this SLA but were making no promises at this point. I can assure you that it is an issue that I an not letting go of, as it affects me far more often than I would prefer. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
