Telecom broadband down again 2012-12-11 21:45

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Telecom broadband down again 2012-12-11 21:45

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#733808 17-Dec-2012 19:04

NonprayingMantis:
surfisup1000: "Telecom will offer free nationwide landline calls on Christmas Day to make up for widespread broadband outages that affected up to two thirds of its customers last week."

I'm on free nationwide calling, so , no compensation for me!

Because telecom are not taking a financial hit for such outages they may take less care than otherwise in future.

Not taking a financial hit?

I appreciate that you won’t be gaining anything (which is why the offer is just silly), but most people wouldn’t be on the unlimited calling packages and so would normally be making quite a bit of calling on xmas day to family around NZ, which will now generate no revenue for Telecom. So they are definitely taking a financial hit. Whether the financial hit is for the appropriate people is another matter (yes in some cases, no in others)

It is speculation to guess how many are on free calling. My opinion is that telecom are still taking the cheap option . I'm sure in past years they have often given special xmas rates anyway.

I liken Telecoms offer to me ordering an inedible Burger combo meal at McDonalds. On complaining, McDonalds cooks up a chicken nugget gives it to a total stranger.

I'm not saying that telecom are not taking it seriously, but, I'd be more inclined to believe this if they gave a refund.

If the cost of outages were quantified then telecom would perhaps invest in additional testing (or less, if the cost of an outage is less than the cost of extra testing).

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NonprayingMantis

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#733850 17-Dec-2012 19:52

surfisup1000:
plambrechtsen:
surfisup1000: "Telecom will offer free nationwide landline calls on Christmas Day to make up for widespread broadband outages that affected up to two thirds of its customers last week."

I'm on free nationwide calling, so , no compensation for me!

Because telecom are not taking a financial hit for such outages they may take less care than otherwise in future.

I think you would be very ill-advised to think that Telecom don't take this outage very seriously.

If you have a specific concern I recommend you ring the Broadband helpdesk on 0800 225598 about your specific issue.

I can assure you that this the issue is known to the highest levels of management and is being taken very seriously. I'm personally working on a solution to ensure it never occurs again.

If telecom took it seriously they'd have refunded customers 2/30 of the monthly broadband amount.

'Show me the money'

The compensation offer is woefully inadequate and compensates those who don't have broadband more than me.

That would be about 4 or 5 bucks for most people, and I would think that a lot of people would construe 4 bucks as an insulting amount, no matter how correct it was.

MikeSkyrme

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#733862 17-Dec-2012 20:03

surfisup1000:
plambrechtsen:
surfisup1000: "Telecom will offer free nationwide landline calls on Christmas Day to make up for widespread broadband outages that affected up to two thirds of its customers last week."

I'm on free nationwide calling, so , no compensation for me!

Because telecom are not taking a financial hit for such outages they may take less care than otherwise in future.

I think you would be very ill-advised to think that Telecom don't take this outage very seriously.

If you have a specific concern I recommend you ring the Broadband helpdesk on 0800 225598 about your specific issue.

I can assure you that this the issue is known to the highest levels of management and is being taken very seriously. I'm personally working on a solution to ensure it never occurs again.

If telecom took it seriously they'd have refunded customers 2/30 of the monthly broadband amount.

'Show me the money'

The compensation offer is woefully inadequate and compensates those who don't have broadband more than me.

Was the system down for two days?

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dman

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#733866 17-Dec-2012 20:08

Far out... this explains why last week my connection here in Greenlane was up and down all the time! As I'm on Telecom.

And meh to their "compensation", I almost never make land line calls!

https://www.youtube.com/c/SoundSpeeding

riahon

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#733867 17-Dec-2012 20:08

I've said it before and I will say it again. We have become a bunch of whingers. Pretty soon we will be known as the Crybaby Kiwis.

dman

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#733869 17-Dec-2012 20:09

riahon: I've said it before and I will say it again. We have become a bunch of whingers. Pretty soon we will be known as the Crybaby Kiwis.

I didn't complain about this last week! :-P

Only posted about it now because I saw the thread in the sidebar as a trending now hot topic.

https://www.youtube.com/c/SoundSpeeding

dman

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#733870 17-Dec-2012 20:10

NonprayingMantis:
surfisup1000:
plambrechtsen:
surfisup1000: "Telecom will offer free nationwide landline calls on Christmas Day to make up for widespread broadband outages that affected up to two thirds of its customers last week."

I'm on free nationwide calling, so , no compensation for me!

Because telecom are not taking a financial hit for such outages they may take less care than otherwise in future.

I think you would be very ill-advised to think that Telecom don't take this outage very seriously.

If you have a specific concern I recommend you ring the Broadband helpdesk on 0800 225598 about your specific issue.

I can assure you that this the issue is known to the highest levels of management and is being taken very seriously. I'm personally working on a solution to ensure it never occurs again.

If telecom took it seriously they'd have refunded customers 2/30 of the monthly broadband amount.

'Show me the money'

The compensation offer is woefully inadequate and compensates those who don't have broadband more than me.

That would be about 4 or 5 bucks for most people, and I would think that a lot of people would construe 4 bucks as an insulting amount, no matter how correct it was.

Yeah it cost me more than that, in terms of downtime from work.

https://www.youtube.com/c/SoundSpeeding

freitasm

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#733871 17-Dec-2012 20:10

I think he's talking about people asking for that $5 compensation ;)

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chevrolux

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#734070 18-Dec-2012 08:07

Yeah it cost me more than that, in terms of downtime from work.

Again though, if the net is so so important you lose money when it is down why is there not a backup solution in place?! With 2degress doing 12GB for $99 for 6 months there is pretty much no excuse not too!

I wouldn't expect compensation for this. It wasn't even Telecom's fault in the first place. And people just need to roll with the punches some times I think.

SteveC

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#734072 18-Dec-2012 08:08

The number one problem, IMHO, is that people still flock to pay Telecom for the privilege of having crap service. Telecom don't have a financial motivation to improve reliability with a fair chunk of the country think that other providers are no better.
Personally, TelstraClear cable has been excellent for us for a few years now. I am nervous about the Vodafone purchase though. Perhaps, in five years or so, UFB will bring the quality and options for the rest of the country that most of Wellington region has had for 10 to 15 years!

freitasm

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#734078 18-Dec-2012 08:19

SteveC: The number one problem, IMHO, is that people still flock to pay Telecom for the privilege of having crap service. Telecom don't have a financial motivation to improve reliability with a fair chunk of the country think that other providers are no better.

Any specific instance of bad service you can report, or just "impression" and "opinion"?

I am with TelstraClear (and for the the last twelve years no less), but I think you haven't looked deep into Telecom's services lately otherwise you'd find they have been consistently good in performance, customer services, etc.

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plambrechtsen

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#734093 18-Dec-2012 08:44

SteveC: The number one problem, IMHO, is that people still flock to pay Telecom for the privilege of having crap service. Telecom don't have a financial motivation to improve reliability with a fair chunk of the country think that other providers are no better.
Personally, TelstraClear cable has been excellent for us for a few years now. I am nervous about the Vodafone purchase though. Perhaps, in five years or so, UFB will bring the quality and options for the rest of the country that most of Wellington region has had for 10 to 15 years!

I find it interesting that you've found TelstraClear's cable service excellent and have had nothing but issues with Telecom ADSL.

My personal view was before I joined Telecom I was with TelstraClear cable which I loved, but in regards to overall service stability and value for money even without my staff discount I am paying less but getting more data for my Telecom + Sky service than I ever was for my TCL triple play service with a faster overall browsing speed. Yes larger downloads can be slower but the move from cable to adsl hasn't had any negative impact on our household.

My wife who is very non-technical noticed a performance increase when we moved from Cable 2 years ago "facebook just seems to load faster" and we haven't had an outage since the DSL Service was connected until last week, any of the transparent proxy issues have been resolved quickly (pretty much thanks to me!), and I've never had any of the routing anomalies that I have seen talked about at length in the TCL forum which dragged on for weeks and weeks.

I can also say that few the times I have had to ring the Telecom support lines most times there was no wait time at all and my problems were resolved by tier 1 folks, unlike with TCL where the few times I had issues I always waited in excess of 45+ mins on hold (always run with mobile) whenever I needed to do anything with them.

Again this is my own view and not that of my employer having been/being a customer of both companies.

No one is perfect and I know some of the technical folks involved who are all jointly mortified it occurred and there is an unbelievable level of high care against the system(s) now to ensure this doesn't occur again.

Telecom do take the issue extremely seriously as a company focusing on our customers is our primary goal. As an employee I love working for Telecom due to the extremely committed and wonderful people I get to work with every day. Sure it has some issues with being a large corporate, but the job satisfaction I get far outweighs any of the pain I feel.

SteveC

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#734118 18-Dec-2012 09:33

freitasm: Any specific instance of bad service you can report, or just "impression" and "opinion"?

Nothing very objective. Just biased impression, with a touch of naivety (assuming national outages from other providers would be reported as rigorously as Telecom's are). The Truenet figures you linked to appear to be about speed, whereas I would suspect that for a majority of customers speed ranks way behind broken connections in priority. (Perhaps not, in light of plambrechtsen's comments.)
My bias is not so much that I don't like Telecom, as much as a frustration that so many people I know put up with specific examples of poor service, and high prices in the past (this seems to be changing). IMHO the "New Zealanders Never Complain" syndrome causes massive problems in all areas of life!
http://bigrick.bandcamp.com/track/new-zealanders-never-complain
When it comes down to it, we have generally had excellent cable service since Saturn first came down our street, and if things stay that way, I'm happy!

Thanks for your comments plambrechtsen. I totally respect and accept you are giving an accurate summary of your experience. Personally I've not used any 'Chorus' ADSL service. I did manage a very slow TelstraClear (TCL) business ADSL connection in Porirua (a novelty in itself) which was almost perfect for six years or so (still is, as far as I know).
Customer service definitely varies enormously from experiences I've heard about Telecom and TCL. Apart from the months when we were affecting by layer two routing issues a couple of years ago, the rest of our time with TCL has delivered what we wanted. I've very seldom rung customer service, and wait time has varied.
Given the nature of ADSL and its variants, I'd have thought that connection speed would vary enormously between (and even within) exchange areas. In theory TCL cable should be more consistent, given it is all similar age and technology, but the impression I get from reading forums here is that TCL manage to stuff up their network in various ways.
We use TCL for Internet and Freeview TV, and WorldcChange for telephony over IP.
Looking at the performance links freitasm posted, and the latest Consumer ISP rankings (most ISPs above 70% "overall performance") it would appear that most people are getting reasonable service. This is great, and a particular credit to Telecom and Vodafone who used to be much lower in these surveys are a few years ago.

All up, it is an interesting world, with UFB a potential major upheaval, that many of us watch with interest.

ptinson

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#734139 18-Dec-2012 09:51

I have to agree with plambrechtsen.
If you have ever been on the inside of a major outage in the Telecom broadband network you would be left with no doubt how seriously they take them.

Telecoms network is also one of the most rigorously tested I have ever seen, some times to the frustration of those deploying services on it. The level of compliance is very high.

That it happened a number of times in a week says to me that there was a lot of work going on to stabilise the issue, with remedial work being carried out late at night to minimise impact.

I would imagine those with SLA contracts and business services have a right to expect compensation, those on residential plans in my personal opinion dont. That is my personal POV and not that of any one other than me.

Paul

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freitasm

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#734146 18-Dec-2012 09:58

I think SteveC needs to go around our Slingshot and Orcon forums...

There are way mo complaints on those than here on the Telecom subfoum.

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