[TelstraClear] Terrible Product, Terrible Service.

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BurgerNZ

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#16602 18-Oct-2007 13:56

I've been a Telstra customer for over 6 years now, and subscribe to their TV, Broadband and Telephone services. This is my first post here, and my last resort trying to contact Telstra.

To give you a little background, I have the Lightspeed 80g service, which is 80gigs per month, at 10mb down and 2mb up. Roughly 3 weeks ago my internet speed dropped out, noticeably. When I got home from work I experienced abysmal speeds, until about midnight when they went back to normal.

I have a 10 megabit downstream connection. By my reasoning I should be able to download a file, or multiple files at roughly 1200 kilobytes per second. I've only ever been able to get close to 500kB p/s, or 3.9mb p/s. I contacted Telstra yonks ago regarding this, but they told me that I didn't understand how it worked, and that was the theoretical maximum. Why it's marketed as 10mb I don't know.

Anyway, back to the main issue. I thought I'd give Telstra a call about my lack of speed, so I called the 0508 number and tried to get through to somebody. I was told that I could expect a wait time of roughly 74 minutes. Telstras telephone robot obviously assumed I was also a telephone robot, and expected me to wait that long. I sent them an email instead, asking why my internet was so slow, and how I should be expected to wait for 74 minutes on my phone.

They replied a few days later saying I should ring up and say there is something wrong with my TV, which will cut me to the front of the queue (obviously TV is more important than internet). So I did just that, which put me through to a guy, who put me on hold for 10 minutes, then told me there was nothing he could do, and that somebody would call me back the next day on my cellphone.

Getting quite livid now, I waited for the call, for 2 days, which never ended up coming. So I called them again, TV's broken again, expect to wait for 16 minutes. I waited for 32 minutes and hung up. I sent them ANOTHER email, explaining how again and again they have failed me, as a customer.

If anyone is interested, I can reliably get (during the hours of 5-11pm) 0.1 megabit per second downstream, and 1 megabit per second upstream. I have performed about 12 tests from www.speedtest.net, mostly using the Citylink option, sometimes Napier and Auckland. Xbox Live is unplayable, files downloading from the US or NZ are all affected, usually maxing out at 50kB/s.

So if anyone is out there from Telstra, please get in touch with me. I do enjoy paying for your expensive services, but I can't if you won't provide them. If you want the bill paid this month, best get in touch no ? After all, quoting your website...

"At the heart of TelstraClear's strategy is our focus on our customers. We understand that people have a choice so we have to offer what people want. We are constantly listening to our customers. While New Zealand has a passion for innovation and early adoption, people don't change for the fun of it. There has to be a reason. We are in the business of providing that reason through superior products and services."

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#91525 18-Oct-2007 14:14

Welcome to Geekzone...

500 kB/s is a good rate - you realise download speeds depend on many factors not only your connection? Where the files are coming from, the traffic on that server, how many hops between your computer and the server, time of the day.

In short, outside Telstra's own network they have no control - as much you don't...

I am too using this plan, and I am generally happy when I can get things at 500 kB/s or more. Usually you get this from fast servers with a good distribution infrastructure - such as Akamai seeded files or microsoft.com.

If you do feel the performance is not what you expected, start by asking for a technician to check your wiring around the house. Make sure you don't have obvious configuration problems - for example some brands are better than others in performance. If you are using wireless at home try using a wired connection instead, and so on.

Make sure there is nothing on your side, trying to reduce the number of variables...

BurgerNZ

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#91526 18-Oct-2007 14:39

Thanks for your reply.

I believe I have carried out due diligence on my part. Tested downloading from different locations etc.

I would love for a technician to check my wiring. But I quite literally cannot get in touch with Telstra to ask them to sort it out, which is why I posted here. If you wanted my non expert opinion, the problem really only happens during peak hours, i.e, 5-11pm. If Telstra can only provide me with 1% of the service I'm paying for during the time I'm home, I'll happily go elsewhere.

That said, my equipment should be fine. Modem itself is connected to an Apple Airport Extreme, which is in turn connected to a Bay Networks 16 port 10/100 switch. All speed tests were carried out on a wired connection, with no other device/PC actively using the internet.

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#91530 18-Oct-2007 14:56

Also, worthwhile to check and see if there's any firmware update available or not. My previous experience when I've gone from 4Mbit to 10Mbit, I couldn't achieve as near 10Mbit and had a technician came to visit us at his own time even. Later, found out that the router was the culprit and did a firmware update and all is fine.

Worthwhile too is, try direct modem-pc connection and do speedtest everywhere, just to isolate the problem a bit further. (I was quite resistive when TCL technician suggested that to me, I didn't believe it was my router, but I was proved wrong... so worth doing that test)

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#91531 18-Oct-2007 15:04

freitasm: Welcome to Geekzone...

500 kB/s is a good rate - you realise download speeds depend on many factors not only your connection? Where the files are coming from, the traffic on that server, how many hops between your computer and the server, time of the day.

And your computer, and your computer disk, and your firewall, and their firewall, and your operating system, and latency. Especially latency.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

* Network Protocols
All network protocols have some overhead, which limits the amount of bandwidth available for user data. It is unusual to achieve much better than 80%-90% efficiency. So, if your raw line speed is 10Mbps, the *maximum* attainable file transfer rate, after overheads, is unlikely to greater than 8Mbps, that is, 1MBps.

* Network Elements
If you have a firewall or such in your network, you need to know how fast it can go. A lot of them won't do much above 5Mbps. On an Ethernet LAN, make sure the full-duplex settings of all elements match. A mismatched setting dramatically limits performance. *Beware:* auto-sensing of full-duplex often does not work properly (and can't be turned off either on budget switches).

* Asymmetry
ADSL and Cable Modem connections are usually asymmetric. That is, the upload and download speeds are different. For any connection that involves bidirectional traffic, the slower link (usually the uplink) will determine the speed.

Most protocols (such as TCP), require packets to be acknowledged. Thus, even though most of the traffic (for example, loading a web page) is in one direction, a stream of acknowledgements must flow in the other direction. The rate at which acknowledgement packets can be sent will thus limit at which packets can be received.

Streaming multimedia is one of the few applications that does not suffer from this problem.

*Latency

This is a subtle problem.
For any protocol that acknowledges receipt of packets (i.e. almost anything except streaming multi-media) the maximum throughput is limited by the receive buffer size (the maximum amount of data that may be sent before an acknowledgement must be received) and the round-trip time. For TCP the formula is:

BW_Bps = RWIN / RTT

(Where BW is the bandwidth, in bytes/sec, RWIN is the Receive Window Size, in bytes, and RTT is the Round Trip Time, in seconds). Since bandwidth is normally given in bits per second, the formula becomes:

BW_bps = 8 × RWIN / RTT

The latency in a circuit comes from many sources, but for long distances the main contributor is simply the speed of light. Even at 300,000 km/s, it takes an appreciable amount of time for a packet to pass around the world, and no increase in bandwidth will alter this. Bear in mind that the round trip time is twice this, and that the speed of light in fibre-optic cables is only about 67% of the speed in a vacuum.

Many TCP/IP implementations have receive window sizes that are inadequate for high speed over wide area networks. For example, WinNT/2k/XP defaults to a maximum of 16kB. This leads to the following limitations:

Max BW (bps)	RWIN (kB)	RTT (ms)
131,072,000	16	1	LAN
10,922,667	16	12	Auckland-Wellington
2,912,711	16	45	Sydney
873,813	16	150	West coast USA
569,878	16	230	East coast USA
354,249	16	370	UK
327,680	16	400	1 satellite hop

Taking into account delays through modems, it gets even worse.

Max BW	RWIN (kB)	RTT (ms)
6.9Mbps	16	19	TCL WN-AK	cable modem
4.1Mbps	16	32	TCL WN-AK	ADSL (interleaving off)
2.1Mbps	16	62	TCL WN-AK	WiMAX
1.6Mbps	16	82	TCL WN-AK	ADSL (interleaving on)
2.5Mbps	16	52	Sydney	cable modem
2.0Mbps	16	65	Sydney	ADSL (interleaving off)
1.4Mbps	16	95	Sydney	WiMAX
1.1Mbps	16	115	Sydney	ADSL (interleaving on)
834.9kbps	16	157	West Coast USA	cable modem
771.0kbps	16	170	West Coast USA	ADSL (interleaving off)
655.4kbps	16	200	West Coast USA	WiMAX
595.8kbps	16	220	West Coast USA	ADSL (interleaving on)
553.0kbps	16	237	East Coast USA	cable modem
524.3kbps	16	250	East Coast USA	ADSL (interleaving off)
468.1kbps	16	280	East Coast USA	WiMAX
436.9kbps	16	300	East Coast USA	ADSL (interleaving on)
347.7kbps	16	377	UK	cable modem
336.1kbps	16	390	UK	ADSL (interleaving off)
312.1kbps	16	420	UK	WiMAX
297.9kbps	16	440	UK	ADSL (interleaving on)

Since we can't upgrade the speed of light yet, the only alternative is to change the appropriate registry settings.

* The map is not the territory

For long distances, the distance between two points as measured on a map may bear scant resemblance to the route that a fibre optic cable takes. For example, the route from New Zealand to Japan goes on undersea cable to Hawaii, then to Los Angeles, then back through Hawaii and then on to Japan. Furthermore, the path that the TCP/IP packets take may be different again, depending on the route that has been chosen by the overseas provider. Note also that while the New Zealand provider may send packets to a destination along one route, the return path may be very different, and there is nothing that the New Zealand provider can do about it as it is not under their control. (This is also not something that shows up with traceroute, which only shows the forward path taken, not the reverse path).

* Congestion

And that's all before we take into account congestion on international links. Just a little bit of congestion can make a big difference.

So, can you really get 10Mbps? Yes, I've done it, downloading from local web sites.

BurgerNZ

18 posts

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#91534 18-Oct-2007 15:17

I think some of you misunderstand.

I'm not complaining that I've been able to get 500kB/s downstream for the past 3+ years. I'm complaining that during the hours of 5-11pm I am getting speeds of 50kB/s (or 0.1 megabit a second, or 1% of what Telstra is advertising). It's not outside of Telstra's control. If I download 2 files from different providers I can expect each speed to drop to 25kB/s. If I download 5 file, 10kB/s. That is an indication of throttling at the ISP end.

My network cables do not have speeds that fluctuate when the sun goes down. My router performs the same operation on network packets at 5 in the morning as it does at 5 at night. My PC also does not change shape or function in any way depending on the time of day.

The fact that my speed craps itself during peak time tells me that Telstra cannot handle the load during peak. Something needs to be done, move me to a different subnet or some other network nonsense.

If that cannot be done, fine. I'll close my account and go to a provider that can provide me with a service that somewhat approximates what I'm paying for.

stroke64

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#91541 18-Oct-2007 16:28

Sounds like shaping to me. You've done your homework, which is 10,000% more troubleshooting than the average person who calls an ISP helpdesk.

Problem is, these days, most ISPs/Telcos don't give a toss about a single intelligent customer complaining about something while the ignorant masses blithely put up with it. IMO TCL are no better than Telecom in that regard.

On the subject of helpdesks - for years I have wished that ISPs would have two different types of helpdesk; one for n00bs, and one for people with a clue. That way when you (as an IT professional) ring the ISP you can talk to someone who actually knows what you are talking about.
</rant>

freitasm

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#91542 18-Oct-2007 16:31

BurgerNZ: I think some of you misunderstand.

I'm not complaining that I've been able to get 500kB/s downstream for the past 3+ years. I'm complaining that during the hours of 5-11pm I am getting speeds of 50kB/s

Well, I sure misunderstood you, because on your first post you wrote:

"I've only ever been able to get close to 500kB p/s, or 3.9mb p/s"

And as I wrote, 500 kB/s is pretty good. Or you didn't mean what you wrote on the first post?

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BurgerNZ

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#91546 18-Oct-2007 16:41

Well, I sure misunderstood you, because on your first post you wrote:

"I've only ever been able to get close to 500kB p/s, or 3.9mb p/s"

And as I wrote, 500 kB/s is pretty good. Or you didn't mean what you wrote on the first post?

Sorry, let me elaborate. The maximum I can download, either many files, one file, bittorrent etc at any time I have found is roughly 3.9 megabits per second. This is on a 10 megabit plan.

An analogy would be purchasing a car that is advertised to have a maximum speed of 120 kilometers per hour. My new car only travels at 50 kilometers per hour, or a little under half what they said it would.

While my 50kp/h car gets me to work and back every day, which is good, I am a bit annoyed that it doesn't do what they said it would. But suddenly (last few weeks) I have a new problem. When I want to take my car to work, it only goes at 1 kilometer per hour. During the middle of the day it's fine, but when I want to use it the most, it's performing at it's worst.

Of course the car company has a disclaimer, saying they are in no way responsible for the car living up to its advertised 120 kp/h. While I reluctantly accept this, I am not happy with it constantly travelling at 1 kilometer per hour, especially when the car company is charging me $120+ per month for the privelidge. I may as well not have it.

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#91566 18-Oct-2007 18:53

BurgerNZ:
An analogy would be purchasing a car that is advertised to have a maximum speed of 120 kilometers per hour. My new car only travels at 50 kilometers per hour, or a little under half what they said it would.

While my 50kp/h car gets me to work and back every day, which is good, I am a bit annoyed that it doesn't do what they said it would. But suddenly (last few weeks) I have a new problem. When I want to take my car to work, it only goes at 1 kilometer per hour. During the middle of the day it's fine, but when I want to use it the most, it's performing at it's worst.

Of course the car company has a disclaimer, saying they are in no way responsible for the car living up to its advertised 120 kp/h. While I reluctantly accept this, I am not happy with it constantly travelling at 1 kilometer per hour, especially when the car company is charging me $120+ per month for the privelidge. I may as well not have it.

Good analogy.. now let us add one other thing. Traffic. Just like on a road you do not expect to be traveling without any other cars on the internet you are also not the only user. What you are experiencing is a network traffic jam.

The reason it slows down is because there are other people sharing your "road" and at the times that you are saying you get slowdowns is exactly when everyone else is also on the net.

Unfortunately not only are you getting congestion because everyone else is hitting the net when they get home from work but also no ISP designs their network to allow every user to get there full bandwidth at the same time. This is the same anywhere you go and to be honest my experience is that Telstra are better then most.

On that subject I think you would be rather unpleasantly surprised if you did go with another ISP. Contrary to your title the one thing that Telstra do have is a good product. Yes their customer service is just sad but the product is good.

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#91577 18-Oct-2007 19:48

I will stop posting in this topic because I really think there's nothing wrong with the beaviour. Traffic at peak times is bad for any network, as nety explained. 500 kB (kilobytes) per second on a download without competing traffic is great - I get about this when downloading from Microsoft servers and much less from other servers - and I think it's a good performace.

As explained above, there's an overhead and you can't expect 100% of bandwidth available - you should expect about 80%. Then there's traffic. Then there are servers, routers, international links, etc.

At times I use speedtest.net and get 11 Mbps as a result, other times I get 4 Mbps. Either way I am happy because on average I get a better experience than DSL would offer...

No, I don't think it's unreasonable...

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#91595 18-Oct-2007 20:45

Slightly off the topic, but your car analogy sounds exactly like the Auckland motorway system!

I too experienced the terrible Telstraclear hold system. In the end I just put the phone on speaker and walked around with it playing music for an hour or so. Emails didn't seem to get the job done. The only time I got things fixed was when talking to a CSR.

I am glad to have changed providers. I don't miss the holds on the phone with TCL. Good luck.

Cheers,

Matt.

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rattler

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#91599 18-Oct-2007 20:57

The last 3 times i have called telstra clear it has been during the day or on the weekend and i was (plesently) startled to have my phone answered on about the 3rd ring by a real person who fixed my issues.. i even had an installer out on the latest call the next day...

i would call TCL help desk during the working day if you still wanted to persue this... but i do agree with Freitasm and Nety.. everyone gets that slow down when NZ gets home from work to check email, update their facebook and check their Auctions.

BurgerNZ

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#91600 18-Oct-2007 21:05

freitasm: I will stop posting in this topic because I really think there's nothing wrong with the beaviour. Traffic at peak times is bad for any network, as nety explained. 500 kB (kilobytes) per second on a download without competing traffic is great - I get about this when downloading from Microsoft servers and much less from other servers - and I think it's a good performace.

As explained above, there's an overhead and you can't expect 100% of bandwidth available - you should expect about 80%. Then there's traffic. Then there are servers, routers, international links, etc.

At times I use speedtest.net and get 11 Mbps as a result, other times I get 4 Mbps. Either way I am happy because on average I get a better experience than DSL would offer...

No, I don't think it's unreasonable...

No, it's not unreasonable to expect that at all. Perhaps you are missing the bit where I say I'm getting a reliable 0.1 megabits per second, reliably.

Anyway, I did get through to somebody at Telstra, after about 30 minutes on hold. Nothing they can do until November/December. Apparently it's due to TelstraClear products being so attractive and popular in the Wellington Region. Yeah, the CSR was marketing to me. It's also unreasonable to expect that I should pay any less for a vastly degraded/near useless service for several months.

Time to write a letter I think.

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#91601 18-Oct-2007 21:09

I don't think I can agree with everybody else here, 50 kBytes/second is what, roughly 400kbits/second. If poster's connection is routinely *topping out* at that, on his 10M connection, then something is wrong somewhere.

I have a 10M cable connection also, I can't say I take too much notice of what speeds I get out of it, because my usage isn't terribly speed dependant, but I can say that I'm presently downloading a couple of things at 50 to 60kB/s combined (but not an equal split, so I imagine it's bottlenecked at the servers), and I just ran some speedtests at speedtest.net and got consisent 10M results to Auckland, 3.5mbps to sydney, and around 1mbps to LA (and all the uplink speeds were respectable also).

I am happy with my own results, but if like poster #1 I was finding that I couldn't get more than about 400kbps total down the line, repeatedly and predicatbly, I wouldn't be too happy with that either.

Edit: I'm in Christchurch

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BurgerNZ

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#91645 19-Oct-2007 09:05

Update!

Check out this email from TelstraClear:

We are aware of speed issues in your area and are working to increase network capacity so you will get full speed. Don't expect us to use excuses like peak time and distance from the exchange because we don't consider these to be influential factors on our network. Distance from the exchange definitely has nothing to do with a cable connection and with network congestion during peak times you probably will notice this trend but it is not something you should expect. We strive to give all customers the full speed of their plan 24/7. We hope to have you back up to full speed by the end of the month.

I should not expect network congestion on the TelstraClear network.

That was the exact excuse I was given by a TelstraClear technician over the phone last night. What's going on here ? I shouldn't expect these excuses from TC ? Then why are you giving them to me ?

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