Telecom usage meter inacurate?

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Telecom usage meter inacurate?

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#482759 19-Jun-2011 11:31

So if I was affected, but never went over my cap, I don't get re-compensated?

I aim to never go over our cap of 40gb, but if Telecom have been over-meetering my data, then that is significantly unfair.

NonprayingMantis

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#482768 19-Jun-2011 12:41

chrisjunkie: So if I was affected, but never went over my cap, I don't get re-compensated?

I aim to never go over our cap of 40gb, but if Telecom have been over-metering my data, then that is significantly unfair.

the problem is, I suppose, that people who went over their cap were definitely affected whether they knew it or not, but people who didn't exceed their cap may, or may not, have bee affected depending on whether they actively monitor their data or not.
Telecom can identify those who went over their cap but if you didn't hit your cap then there is no way for Telecom to know whether you monitored your usage and modified your behaviour to avoid hitting your cap or simply just used data as normal and so were totally unaffected and unaware.

I suggest you give them a call and ask about compensation for your individual circumstance. that is probably the best thing to do.

If it is anything like the XT outage compo, then there will be a blanket standard amount of compo which is fine for the majority of people, and then people with special circumstances that Telecom cannot know about (like yourself) will need to state their case and be compod on a case by case basis.

chriswiggins

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#482770 19-Jun-2011 12:45

I never monitored whether what was being recorded was accurate or not, but if it was inaccurate then yeah as I said a bit unfair. I did go over a couple of months so I suppose I'll just sit tight and see if they get in contact

5uperTed

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#482786 19-Jun-2011 13:45

Hi all. well Finally some action Big thanks to Cue Club and Chris Barton, and of course Telecom for finally finding the problem.. Now at least I won't have to spend the time everyday updating my statistics I'll just randomly do it.
Cheers and thanks for all your support and input

networkn

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#482853 19-Jun-2011 17:49

It's really hard to not feel that after so many problems Telecom "accidentally" has with it's usage meter, that this isn't intentional. Of course they will come out and say no no, it's completely an accident and give credits etc, but when internet is metered in NZ, then it should be able to be reliably metered. It's a pretty fundamental part of the process. I don't believe personally only 7% of the people were incorrectly counted, and I would like to know exactly what the problem was. I have been involved in helping customers with their usage issues with various ISP's in NZ since the pilot of ADSL, I can't tell you how many times I have proven differences between meters and actual usage and had credits issued.

cbrpilot

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#482904 19-Jun-2011 20:22

@networkn: hate to break the conspiracy theory here, but why on earth would Telecom do something like this on purpose? More money you might say.... well how many millions of dollars do you think that Telecom is going to pay for this one? What impact will it have on their PR? They would always lose money from this type of thing.

So, no, they're not that stupid!

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jbard

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#482913 19-Jun-2011 20:45

Not sure about this being a special case and needing to call up for compensation.

Most people these days monitor their broadband usage whether they are technically minded or not. I would image a good proportion if not the majority of the 7% effected would have had to decrease their broadband use to provent them reaching their cap because of tis problem.

networkn

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#482915 19-Jun-2011 20:47

They aren't giving away money more than they earned with the problem in the first place. Plus considering this type of thing is going on much longer than you realize etc.. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility.

The other possibility is that they are incompetent and have been since the original DSL Pilot. As I said, I have been in IT a long time and I have dealt with these issues for customers MANY hundreds of times.

Either way it's not a good look for Telecom.

Ragnor

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#482961 19-Jun-2011 22:41

It's not a conspiracy, you're barking up the wrong tree there imo.

All software and most hardware has bugs, software is not perfect and likely never will be as long as we have humans writing it.

However, the lame thing here (imo) is the length of time it took be resolved despite it reported and pointed out by several tech savvy users eg: SuperTed, CueClub and others on GZ and GP forums.

What's worse is it only appears to have been seriously looked at because of mainstream media pressure.

jbard

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#482963 19-Jun-2011 22:50

However, the lame thing here (imo) is the length of time it took be resolved despite it reported and pointed out by several tech savvy users eg: SuperTed, CueClub and others on GZ and GP forums.

What's worse is it only appears to have been seriously looked at because of mainstream media pressure.

Yes that does annoy me as well. Although the Telecom people do an awesome job on these forums 99% of the time and i am very greatful for that, this time the people who brought up the complaint with evidence seem to have been dismissed without any investigation into the matter.

Maybe it was put in the to hard basket or they couldn't find the problem.

It's dissapointing that the main stream media had to bring this up. If Telecom had looked into this after the geekzone/gp complaints and found the problem they could have fixed the problem and had compensation out before the mainstream media had even stiffed at the story.

It would have been in the interests of Telecom as they wouldn't have had the PR disaster they have now.
I think it was very short sighted of Telecom to ignore this problem for so long, but i guess they are paying the price now.

networkn

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#482966 19-Jun-2011 22:58

I guess that at the risk of contradicting myself, i can understand not having a full blown investigation over a few reports of usage meter inaccuracy, they must deal with it all the time.

Having said that, when your software meters a charged service and it's not accurate, and it's not the first time (Far from it), and the same type of issues keep reoccurring, you can see people drawing the conclusion it's gross ineptitude or deliberate. It may not be, probably isn't, but it definitely is one or the other. There should be checks and balances in place to catch this stuff. If they don't have it, that's irresponsible.

I am not sure of the way to handle it perfectly, but each usage complaint should be logged and once it reaches a certain threshold, an audit should be automatically conducted. Though it seems this problem was so obscure it didn't get get caught in the first level investigation. I would love to see if one was actually conducted at all. I doubt even in the interest of transparency, Telecom would release those records.

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jbard

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#482969 19-Jun-2011 23:06

networkn: I guess that at the risk of contradicting myself, i can understand not having a full blown investigation over a few reports of usage meter inaccuracy, they must deal with it all the time.

Yes i can understand they must get people calling up all the time querying usage and i'm sure 99% its down to a kid/teenager downloading something they shouldn't have or just not understanding file sizes.

But when you have 4-5 knowledgeable users who were providing real and consistent evidence over a number of months it is ignorant to think that their isn't actually a problem somewhere.

Having said that, when your software meters a charged service and it's not accurate, and it's not the first time (Far from it), and the same type of issues keep reoccurring, you can see people drawing the conclusion it's gross ineptitude or deliberate. It may not be, probably isn't, but it definitely is one or the other. There should be checks and balances in place to catch this stuff. If they don't have it, that's irresponsible.

I am not sure of the way to handle it perfectly, but each usage complaint should be logged and once it reaches a certain threshold, an audit should be automatically conducted. Though it seems this problem was so obscure it didn't get get caught in the first level investigation. I would love to see if one was actually conducted at all. I doubt even in the interest of transparency, Telecom would release those records.

Personally i think their should be an independent body in charge of measuring the accuracy of these.
Smilar to what happens with petrol pumps. Would solve a lot of issues and would make ISPs invest in decent software/hardware to provide real time usage meters.

NonprayingMantis

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#482978 19-Jun-2011 23:37

jbard:
networkn: I guess that at the risk of contradicting myself, i can understand not having a full blown investigation over a few reports of usage meter inaccuracy, they must deal with it all the time.

Yes i can understand they must get people calling up all the time querying usage and i'm sure 99% its down to a kid/teenager downloading something they shouldn't have or just not understanding file sizes.

But when you have 4-5 knowledgeable users who were providing real and consistent evidence over a number of months it is ignorant to think that their isn't actually a problem somewhere.

Having said that, when your software meters a charged service and it's not accurate, and it's not the first time (Far from it), and the same type of issues keep reoccurring, you can see people drawing the conclusion it's gross ineptitude or deliberate. It may not be, probably isn't, but it definitely is one or the other. There should be checks and balances in place to catch this stuff. If they don't have it, that's irresponsible.

I am not sure of the way to handle it perfectly, but each usage complaint should be logged and once it reaches a certain threshold, an audit should be automatically conducted. Though it seems this problem was so obscure it didn't get get caught in the first level investigation. I would love to see if one was actually conducted at all. I doubt even in the interest of transparency, Telecom would release those records.

Personally i think their should be an independent body in charge of measuring the accuracy of these.
Smilar to what happens with petrol pumps. Would solve a lot of issues and would make ISPs invest in decent software/hardware to provide real time usage meters.

I agree. Would give customers a lot more confidence in the accuracy too.

And if it isn't already the case, I would also like to see the same thing applied to other metered things where the consumer cannot easily tell it is accurate e.g. gas, electricity, water meter.
Sure, I can watch my electricity meter tick over as I use my fridge, but I have no practical way of knowing that it is actually measuring the correct amount of KwH I have really used.

weird thing is, I self-audit my bandwidth usage every so often to check if it is correct (and it has always been fine so far) but I have never once done a self-audit on my electricity, gas, or water usage.
Which is especially bizzarre because if I overuse BB, then worst case I get my speed reduced but don't pay any more, yet if I overuse water, electricity or gas I definitely get charged more. It's not like power companies are known for super accurate billing either. The same day the telecom story came out so did this one:

http://business.scoop.co.nz/2011/06/17/contact-energy-to-refund-overcharged-customers-280000/

Do any of the people here who monitor their bandwidth do the same for other utilities? If so, how? If not, why not?

cbrpilot

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#482981 19-Jun-2011 23:59

jbard:
Personally i think their should be an independent body in charge of measuring the accuracy of these.
Smilar to what happens with petrol pumps. Would solve a lot of issues and would make ISPs invest in decent software/hardware to provide real time usage meters.

Good idea, but wouldn't have helped in this situation. In all likelihood the independent party would have been hosted off a node that was unaffected by this issue, and thus reported all things were OK.

If I can quote the herald (who is quoting the Telecom Retail CEO):

"Because these boxes are throughout the country, when a certain condition was met in the network - effectively let's call it a reset - that's when the software fault emerged and that wasn't geographically specific,"

So the fault only occurred during a specific network condition. Hard to pick up. All nodes reportedly identical, but unknown to all something is mysteriously different about one of them...

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Ragnor

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#483459 20-Jun-2011 23:24

Have to disagree.

That's an awful idea, it will cost money to run (excessive money if it's a government department) and we all know we will end up wearing that cost in increased prices or via taxes.

It's easy enough to occasionally measure your usage and compare the ISP usage meter.

If you do happen to have an ongoing usage problem it can easily be solved by changing ISP. ISP's other than Telecom and Telstraclear tend to have quite reliable usage meters I have found.

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