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Australian Disconnect

As Telstra, Australia's incumbent telephone provider, gears up for the Olympics, customers and businesses are complaining of sudden loss of service. Is there really no regulator and no laws governing the quality of phone service in Australia?

[August 25, 2000]

On the ISP-Australia list in August, AT, who has been fighting Australia's ILEC, Telstra, for months, asked:

"I just received a letter from Telstra telling me that the policy that details how and why disconnections of services occurs is unavailable freely to the public."

Many respondents were angry about the same issue:

[PD said] "Perhaps, there is no policy. It may be discretionary, and that is a worry if some angry manager within Telstra decides to 'crack down' on those 'awful' customers who dare to challenge the billing, thereby upsetting their stats and figures. . . These people seemingly have the power to arbitrarily, target individuals and risk destroying people's lives and businesses. More accountability and a more transparent and better defined process is needed."

[CD claimed] "We had our lines disconnected because we overpaid! They did not take the overpayment into consideration on the following bill, and 15 days after it was due they cut all our lines off. Then it took them 24 hours to reconnect them because a technician had to go to the local exchange to reconnect. Strange that they can disconnect from a central room, but it takes a man with a screwdriver a trip to the local exchange to reconnect. Upon challenging the call center, they simply put me down as not knowing how their systems work (I mentioned that I work in IT, but that just made it worse. . .).

[MJ added] "Last Friday at 3:30pm our Melbourne POP went down. We immediately called ISP help and logged a fault. We tried rebooting and testing to make sure it was not our problem. Telstra ISP called me back at 6pm saying we were disconnected due to overdue payment of account. My CFO gave me the details of all of our payments. Called back ISP services and was told that Accounts must authorize the reconnection. On 11AM Saturday we were reconnected with no apology or explanation. How can Tel$tra disconnect an ISP without even a phone call saying pay or else?"

This thread will surely continue.