Myth busters: Australian Broadband

It begins: Telstra can't quite manage to turn on a phone line

Back on the 8th of November, we finally got the keys to our new residence. We have a small Telstra box (for phone) and a big Telstra box (for cable) attached to our house, and obvious cables run from these, underneath the house, to various rooms where phone and cable points are visible - helpfully labelled 'Telstra'. What's more, the previous residents seemed to have had a Telstra phone.

We had already contacted Telstra to arrange a phone line. (See Telstra's Level Playing Field). Telstra informed us that the line would be working the very next day. However, there was a minor quirk: our phone number would not have the usual code for the area because the local exchange was full and we would be on a new exchange. Seeing as it was to be a new exchange, I did wonder if it would have DSL2 provision: after all, why build new exchanges that are already out of date? Telstra also offered us BigPond internet via ADSL repeatedly, some might say almost determinedly. We kept refusing as we intended to tranfer our Netspace account.

The next day the phone wasn't working. We contacted Telstra again to ask what was going on. At first they claimed that the problem was with our phone. We informed them that we had tried three different phones, one brand new. Given this information, they offered to investigate the problem, ominously assuring us that we would have to pay a large callout bill if the fault was found to be with 'your equipment'. An engineer would be sent out the 'next day' and we were assured that he would fix the problem immediately. Naturally, I laughed. They offered us BigPond again. Refusing this was becoming a reflex action.

Of course, on that 'next day' the phone still wasn't working. If Telstra send someone out we never saw him, but we weren't required to as apparently he didn't need access to the premises.

Again we phoned Telstra, and again they promised to resolve the problem 'the next day'. By this point the same old excuses were getting really comical. Suffice to say that by the 13th (remember we called them on the 8th) we finally got a working phone line - or so we thought...

Transferring Netspace Broadband

I checked broadband availability on the Netspace and Telstra sites, and they both declared our number was good for A/DSL service.

Our DSL provider was Netspace. We phoned them up to ask how long it would take for them to change our DSL service from the old address to the new one. They said it would take five to ten days, but then mumbled that it might be as few as three. Yes, I really mean DSL, not ADSL, we had a 512/512 symmetric service from Netspace, which is rather useful. I would take it over 1500/256 every time. We also asked about availability on our number, as they had previously been told by Telstra that our number wasn't a Telstra number at all. This time everything seemed to be ok.

We couldn't contact Netspace at first as their phone line would ring through to empty hissing silence. Eventually my wife found a number which wasn't one of their main contact numbers, but did work. They were able to put us through to the right people from there, though we never found why the main lines were dead. Crazy people would say it was Telstra killing the phone service of their competitors. This is obviously mad as it implies a level of 'togetherness' and 'joined up thinking' that simply doesn't seem to be present in Telstra.

We asked Netspace if it was possible for them to not stop the old service until the new service was ready to start. They said this was not possible - though I can see no obvious reason why not other than poor organisation and communication processes. We were informed that our broadband service would terminate immediately that we signed off on the transfer through their web page.

We phoned again, and got a different customer services representative. Netspace customer services appear to be in India of course: quite friendly, but often hard to understand, and the phone connection is frequently poor with severe distortion, which makes things worse. (Netspace tech support are clearly in Australia, for the time being at least). The new representative again quoted the five to ten days, with the could be as few as three 'off the record' proviso. However, they informed us that the existing service would not cease for several hours or possibly a day or two.

On the 14th of November, I went to the Netspace website and attempted to transfer my service to the new address. It failed, informing me that DSL service was not available on that number. I again checked their main availability page, and that still said ok. I changed over to IE instead of using Firefox, and was able to complete the transfer: now the applet seemed to think my number was ok for DSL after all. It cost me $140 to move my service, a rather nice little pickup for them doing about ten minutes work on an existing account.

In short: the Netspace website produces wrong results with Firefox, giving no indication that there is a problem with the browser. This is worse than the page not working at all: quite dreadful design and testing.

Telstra's Revenge

A few days later we phoned Netspace to ask what was going on with our broadband transfer. We were informed that this was blocked by Telstra because they had PSTS 'products' on the line already. This was disturbing, as this was a new connection to a new exchange and we most definitely did not have BigPond. What were these mysterious products? Apparently, Netspace could do nothing about this, and we would have to contact Telstra ourselves.

We immediately contacted Telstra. They attempted to sell us BigPond again. Then they told us that they couldn't do anything about PSTS products if we weren't a BigPond customer. Then they decided that it was a BigPond problem anyway and put us through to BigPond customer support.

BigPond customer support attempted to sell us BigPond and then denied any ability to deal with the problem and passed us back to the phone system customer support. After attempting to sell us BigPond again we were able to get them to admit there was something they could do. We were promised that the problem would be resolved in 20 minutes or so, and they would remove the bogus 'services' that had somehow become attached to our line right away: apparently they had given us BigPond DSL even though we weren't BigPond customers. They hadn't given us a login, or billed us for it, they'd just connected it up anyway ... for fun perhaps?

We immediately rang Netspace and informed them of Telstra's '20 minute' resolution. They asked us to call them back in an hour to check if everything was ok.

An hour later we called Netspace who found that the 'products' were still on the line. They said it might be an update issue and they might be gone by tomorrow. We decided to wait.

The next day we called Netspace to ask about our installation. It was still blocked by the Telstra products. Again, we called Telstra. They assured us the products were gone and tried to sell us BigPond (which they had just removed).

We contacted Netspace and informed them that Telstra denied the existence of any products. After much pleading and explaining we were put in contact with a 'tech person' at Netspace who broke the rules by contacting Telstra directly. He was able to discover that the products were still present but that they had just removed them at his request (again against the rules) but the Netspace db probably wouldn't acknowledge this for another day now. He asked us to check back later...

Somewhere during this process I observed an interview with the current CEO of Telstra. At one point he talked about how the employees of Telstra loved it there so much, and how they really wanted the best for the company. He actually claimed that some employees were leaving the company to go elsewhere out of sheer love of the best interests of Telstra. Amazing eh?

The next day we were able to get assurance from Netspace that there was no longer a problem with Telstra blocking the install.

A few days after that, we contacted Netspace again to get an update. Good thing that we did. We were informed that we were stuck because there were no free ports on our exchange (remember that new exchange Telstra put us on) and they expected an install in three days time... This was sweet, as apparently we'd had a port back when we had those bogus 'products' on our line - but now we couldn't have one.

Three days later... We called Netspace. Still no free ports. They advised us to phone Telstra to find out when ports might be available. We did this, now claiming to be interested in BigPond and curious if we could get a port. Telstra said that they had no plans to add extra ports to our exchange until March and that the exchange was currently full: e.g. if we got BigPond ADSL we would be waiting until March for it to activate.

We waited a while and then called back as Netspace customers. The March date rolled out again, but then they mumbled that it might happen earlier, they didn't really know. They had another look and suggested that they might add some ports for Netspace at the end of December or start of January, but didn't know if there would be enough to fulfill everyone's requests.

We had pretty much established that we had no real hope of a DSL or ADSL based broadband service until March, even though we had paid for one, and even though we apparently had a port on the exchange at the point we asked for the service. How 'unfortunate' that port couldn't just be transferred to Netspace. That said, if Netspace are unbundled maybe that would have been impossible anyway.

Return of the BigPond

We couldn't get Optus cable (and believe me I tried) so it looked like Telstra cable based broadband was the only solution available apart from dialup (or ISDN, but the pricing on that is beyond a joke). Telstra's biggest package is a 20Gb cap with a charge of 15 cents a Mb over the cap. This costs about $100 a month and has an install charge of around $250. Go to their site and see the exact prices and options for yourself. You can't 'self install' unless you already own a cable modem, which we didn't. Telsta also have an unlimited cable plan, which is actually a 10Gb cap. After you hit the cap you are shaped to 64Kb. In short this is so far from unlimited that it's ludicrous.

Compare the price of cable on Telstra to DSL on Netspace: we were getting 60Gb for $80 with 64Kb shaped after we hit the cap. So Telstra is $20 more for one third the cap. Nice. For this you get a customer service line that ends up in India and promises you 'tomorrow' the doesn't deliver. This is similar to the Netspace customer service line, which also ends up in India and promises you 'five to ten days' and then doesn't deliver. The difference with Telstra is that they are brave enough to lie big. (I didn't actually ask the operatives if they were in India, but the line quality seemed to indicate that they were).

I phoned up Telstra and signed up for their cable plan. They offered installation two days later and gave me a number to call in event of a problem.

Two days later the sub-contracted installation engineer turned up on time. He was clearly no Telstra employee. He didn't show me any id and had an unmarked van. He also had a bluetooth headset with which he maintained contact with the Borg Collective or something. I never heard him speak to the headset though he wore it constantly. My Borg theories are confirmed.

The engineer fitted an additional cable point where we wanted it and installed a modem. He then installed some very dodgy looking Telstra software for login authentication without really explaining what it was. He then warned us of various 'bugs' with the cable system and under what circumstances to 'contact Telstra immediately'.

The engineer then checked the telephone pit and tidied up a problem with a corroded cable, which wasn't effecting service, but might of. Apart from his connection to the Borg and the wood shavings on the carpet he didn't vacuum up, he was quick and effective. He did a decent job despite (I suspect) being paid on a per install basis. Of course, he wasn't a Telstra employee.

With cable up and running I had only one problem, or so it seemed: the modem had no router, no firewall and connected directly to my wife's computer. Hardly the ideal product to install on naive end users systems. Do Telstra really have the best interests of their clients at heart? Are they serious about network security? It doesn't really seem as if they are.

I noticed that Telstra push a windows based personal firewall product you can license through them. As this runs on your main Windows box it is rather vulnerable. Once a worm or trojan owns your box it owns your entire network because that firewall will quickly be holed. I prefer a hardware firewall solution, as they are a lot harder to hack (though not impossible). I have two DSL modems with routers, firewall and wireless, but the cable makes them useless. Another solution is required.

I'll be talking about my experiences setting up a Linux box as a firewall in the near future.

posted by Peter Wake @ 3:47 pm