What's going on at Telstra?

[matt]

Well...I've not been able to send/receive emails since the early hours of this morning.

I have internet access....just no emails.

I'm with BigPuddle...and I'm getting very frustrated at how often I encounter this problem

I can't even access the BigPuddle site to see what's going on.

Anyone know if they're carrying out maintenance etc?

[acropolite (Phil)]

I have been doing some large downloads this AM and Bogpond is very slow here as well..

[Maverick]

Telstra
No problems with iiNet

[renormalised (Carl)]

Looks and sounds like Telstra are upto their old stuff ups again. That's why I don't use them now, and will never go back to them. Lousy service for the price you pay.

[Ric]

Everything seems to be running fine at my end of world.

Could be a localised event.

[Glenhuon (Bill)]

As someone who regularly sets up internet access, I would advise anyone who is thinking of using Telstra to forget it and look elsewhere. The service is poor, the charges are way above every other provider, and if you do have a problem the chances of getting real assistance from someone who isn't reading off an A4 sheet are pretty slim.

Bill

[MrB (Simon)]

Heh, never used Telstra but it has happened a couple of times with my provider(Westnet) in the 10 years or whatever it is I've been with them.

Once in the very early morning I wasn't able to get internet access but was able to send emails to myself and use IRC Chat. So I sent the Westnet tech guys an email that their HTTP server had been down for close to an hour(that I knew of) and they sent me a huge thankyou back 'coz they never noticed it.. LOL

[snowyskiesau]

I'm with Telstra (Bigpond Cable) and have been for about 8 years.
Overall, I find the reliability of the service to be good. I've had a couple of breakdowns over the years but all have been repaired fairly quickly. It helped working for a comany that had a close relation ship with Telstra. You can get access to the internal technical people and find out what's really going on when there is an outage.

I went with Telstra as they were the only ones who could supply a cable connection
which at 30Mbps is hard to beat.

I agree with glenhuon about the help desk though! I'm not sure that the help desk people are even reading from the same script.

[matt]

Well...it (email) came back on-line around 2.30 this afternoon.

It was down for at least five hours. Five hours, people...five hours!!!!

It may have been down from even earlier. I think I tried to check emails around 4am. Which would make it 10 hours!

Have you ever heard of a server being down that long with a company the size of Telstra?!?!

It's mind-boggling

[PCH (Paul)]

Actually it was down for me from last thing last night before bedtime - so that's about nine hours it was down over here ! Boo..oo..ooo

[AstralTraveller (David)]

[quote=matt;321762
It was down for at least five hours. Five hours, people...five hours!!!!
[/quote]

Five hours without email! Oh the horror. How did I ever survive the first 40 years of my life .

Dave

[Lee]

Everytime it rains more than 5-10mm, our phone line crackles for 2-3 days. We phone it in, by the time the tech gets around to checking, it has dried out.... "the line test is normal Sir".
They try and scare you off making a service request with threats of $150 charges if the fault is in your wiring. Bureacracy....

[renormalised (Carl)]

Originally Posted by AstralTraveller

Five hours without email! Oh the horror. How did I ever survive the first 40 years of my life .

Dave

Come now, Dave. Don't be so cynical

[matt]

Originally Posted by AstralTraveller

Five hours without email! Oh the horror. How did I ever survive the first 40 years of my life .

Dave

I was just having a bit of a light-hearted dig, Dave. But I'm not kidding about a service that goes belly up for 5-10 hours which I'm paying a premium price for.

It's not good to have no email for that long, especially when so much of your long-distance communication is conducted this way.

Cheers.

[Ian Robinson]

Originally Posted by matt

I was just having a bit of a light-hearted dig, Dave. But I'm not kidding about a service that goes belly up for 5-10 hours which I'm paying a premium price for.

It's not good to have no email for that long, especially when so much of your long-distance communication is conducted this way.

Cheers.

Demand a rebate in your account every time it happens .

You can do that with their landline telephone service , why not broadband too ?

[Ian Robinson]

Originally Posted by Lee

Everytime it rains more than 5-10mm, our phone line crackles for 2-3 days. We phone it in, by the time the tech gets around to checking, it has dried out.... "the line test is normal Sir".
They try and scare you off making a service request with threats of $150 charges if the fault is in your wiring. Bureacracy....

What ? telephone lines are not supposed to be crackly ???

They tried that with me too , even though when I complaigned about the phone line dying ( I still had ADSL ) and the girl I spoke to first did a line test and said the problem was in the exchange ....

Unless you are stuffing about with your wiring .... how can the problem be in the house if nothing has been touched ???

[Gargoyle_Steve (Steve)]

Ian as an ex-telstra Tech Officer, and someone who now works in the Security Industry (ie plenty of clients who don't "stuff around with their internal wiring") I can assure you that there are in fact LOTS of ways for wiring to be effected:

moisture creeping during sustained wet weather, tarnish/corrosion in wiring connections, long term electrolysis, plastic creepage (an insulation issue), tight wiring contracting under severe cold .... this is not to mention the effects of rats/mice eating all the insulation, or weeing on unprotected copper / metal connections .... that's the simple ones to locate.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not siding with Telstra, they often try to get everyone else (like my company) to prove all of OUR gear first beyond a shadow of a doubt before they'll even have a look at things, I don't use their internet and never, ever have even when I was a staff member, etc - but wiring CAN and DOES develop problems "without anyone stuffing around with it" all across this country every single day of the year.

[Lee]

I don't mind if it is my wiring - I'm happy to pay to have it corrected.... would be nice if they could accurately troubleshoot it for me though! I'm thinking of just getting the house rewired, exclude it myself......

[C.A.L.]

I used to live in a rented house at Maraylya and every time it rained, same problem, a crackly phone line. No fix for it apparently, except wait for it to ‘dry out’, which it always did.

Lightning was a different problem – being on top of an iron-rich sandstone hill, we had lots of it – and the phone line went down with almost every storm. It must have been a well known problem, since the next day, almost without fail, out would come the poor technician to fiddle with the lines and restore the service. Most of the time we didn’t even have to notify them. But that would be the internet gone for the night.

[Glenhuon (Bill)]

Quote+
Don't get me wrong, I'm not siding with Telstra, they often try to get everyone else (like my company) to prove all of OUR gear first beyond a shadow of a doubt before they'll even have a look at things,
Quote

On one of the VERY few times I've had a problem with my Westnet connection it took an hour on the phone checking everything on my machine with the tech on the help desk as unless it was done Telstra would just blame me or Westnet and not look at it. Two hours later, the exchange fault was fixed.
Did have a funny one with a mate in WA who is a retired Telstra Tech. He couldn't get his broadband to work so asked me to double check his machine in case he had missed something. Checked the machine, everything was OK. Tried everything, including disconnecting the incoming line and hooking on there. When we called the help desk we got this Indian guy and when we explained the tests we had done he told us "But you cannot do that". My mate grabbed the phone and explained as a Telstra Tech of 40 years he could do anything he Bl***y well liked. This was followed by profuse apologies and a tech fixed it within an hour (foriegn voltage on the line).

Bill