Telstra Bigpond customer service annoyances

A couple of weeks ago Telstra Bigpond began to experience DNS problems with various sites. Other ISPs such as Netspace, and Internode were fine, but Telstra could not resolve those sites. I could connect to those sites and get data from them, but only by raw IP. Clearly, I could route to the sites via Bigpond, so why couldn't their domain name servers route to them to make name queries? I knew for a fact that some of the sites were doing their own DNS, so the domain name server for the site's name and the actual site had the same address. It couldn't be an isolated routing problem (which would have been beyond Bigpond's control).

I made specific tests of their domain name servers to check what came back, and they weren't even returning useful error codes when they failed to process the names. That is to say they weren't saying that the name didn't exist, they were returning that there was an an (unknown) error. I contacted Telstra Bigpond technical support to report the problem.

On the first try at contacting them by phone, I explained the issue over and over, but the employee on the phone simply insisted that they couldn't do anything about the issue and I would have to make an email report. I asked if anyone else had reported similar problems. They vigorously denied that anyone had reported a problem of that kind.

Confirmation that the problem is widespread

I was already fairly certain, given the DNS tests I'd performed, but I wanted to be sure. I contacted a couple of Bigpond users around the country. I was able to confirm that the problem was reproducible in NSW as well as Victoria. They were getting the exact same problems I was. This made it hard to believe the story I'd been told about no other complaints. A friend of mine who works for an IT support company was later to inform me that several customers who used Telstra Bigpond had complained about the same sort of issue to them.

Telstra Bigpond Technical Support do not seem to know what DNS is

On the second try at contacting them by phone, I got someone who didn't even know what DNS was. I had a nice time explaining it to her. So much for technical support, you may as well just stick your finger in your eye. She also denied that there had been other complaints, reports of queries about DNS.

Like the first person, she suggested that I remove my firewall. Yep. That's a sure fire solution to DNS problems. Thanks super-genius. I'm just guessing, but that is pretty much the only thing that Telstra Bigpond customer support ever suggest as a solution besides such gems as 'try turning it off and on again.'

On both occasions they tried to blame my 'equipment', and made vague threats that if they sent an engineer out to test and couldn't reproduce, I would have to pay. They were unclear whether by equipment they meant my modem (provided by them) or my firewall, which they repeatedly asked me to disconnect.

In the end I gave up and made an email report. So much for their vaunted 24 hour phone support that they charge so much for. It's useless. They're really only able to deal with people who have the most basic connection problems.

In the end Telstra Bigpond resolved the problem, silently. It never appeared on their network status page, either as something that was in progress or that had been resolved.

Telstra Bigpond's approach to network security is an affront

The fact that Telstra Bigpond denies reported problems and offers singularly bad advice such as removing your firewall is both shocking and disgusting. They are not helping their customers with that sort of advice, they are endangering them. If I'd been a naive user, I would have followed their idiot instructions and removed my firewall - exposing myself to the endless hammering of SQL worms and other rubbish that routinely scans my ports. I run Snort on my firewall, and I see a lot of attacks. My system would probably be secure anyway, but many users would be at risk in such situation. Is it Bigpond's intention to turn their customer base into some hacker's botnet?

This isn't the first time I've complained about Telstra Bigpond's broken policy of selling users modems without firewalls and then trying to sell them an additional software firewall that offers scant additional security over the Windows SP2 firewall. Telstra Bigpond customer support never asked me whether I ran vulnerable applications, such as a web server, on my machine. They never once warned me of the risk of removing my firewall - they just told me that they couldn't offer support unless I did so.

With this kind of awful behaviour on the part of ISPs it's no wonder that the security crisis grows every year. ISPs should have a legally enforcable duty not only to protect user's security, but to provide support and advice that is responsible and helps educate users about security risks. Having a page about viruses somewhere on their web site isn't really enough. They are happy enough to sell users down the line whenever another company or foreign government wants to identify them to invade their privacy, or for malicious purposes... In fact they seem happy enough to sell users down the line full stop. Shouldn't they put their customers a little higher on the agenda. If more people knew what was going on, maybe things would change.

posted by Peter Wake @ 2:34 pm