[TelstraClear] Cable usage meter

Forums › One NZ (including Farmside) › [TelstraClear] Cable usage meter - word of warning

sjadd

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#19582 22-Feb-2008 14:59

Just wondering, how do people interpret the following statement?

"This usage meter provides an estimate of your usage only and may be running up to 6 hours behind."

I always assumed it meant traffic may not show up on the usage meter for up to 6 hours, but that when it did show up it would be categorised under the correct date/time. However it seems I am wrong...

Case in point: I downloaded ~2.5GB from around 8 - 9:30pm on Wednesday as it was the last day of the billing cycle and I had ~3GB allowance left.

Looking at it today though, the traffic shows up as have occurred at around 4pm the following day (Thursday)! i.e. I have eaten 15% of my current cycle's 20GB allocation already due to downloads that happened outside of the current cycle.

Customer support have told me that this is acceptable for them to do due to the clause mentioned above. I find this very disappointing. Also, the time difference here is way more than 6 hours (try 20).

tonyhughes

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#112309 22-Feb-2008 15:22

You would be covered by the consumer guarantees act, if you are offered x GB a month, and their billing system makes that impossible, they would be compelled to rectify in some way (fix billing system, offer extra data or offer refund / free service proportional to the loss).

Whether you have the time/energy to pursue this in any way is probably the major consideration here.

I am not a lawyer.

lchiu7

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#112473 23-Feb-2008 13:24

I personally think the TCL cable metering system is sorely lacking since it cannot provide you with information as to where your traffic went or came from. It's a huge leap of faith. When it was Paradise (and still cable) you got a usage meter that told you what sites you were visiting and so had an idea how your traffic was made up.

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geoffwnz

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#112527 23-Feb-2008 18:39

lchiu7: I personally think the TCL cable metering system is sorely lacking since it cannot provide you with information as to where your traffic went or came from. It's a huge leap of faith. When it was Paradise (and still cable) you got a usage meter that told you what sites you were visiting and so had an idea how your traffic was made up.

That was certainly handy for tracing unexpected lump sum traffic blocks. :P

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#112773 24-Feb-2008 20:29

I'm going to have my moan about the usage meter today..

I've been stung with several GB of usage on the 21st (1st day of the new month) for usage that actually occured on the evening of the 20th. I purposely download this data on the final day of the month as I had about 5GB of data left and looking at the usage meter I still had 5GB left last month and the data has been added to the first day of the new month.

Sort your systems out TCL - you had a fantastic usage meter with Paradise and you upgraded to something that doesn't work!

sjadd

61 posts

Master Geek

#113361 27-Feb-2008 15:14

Yep 20th and 21st were the exact 2 dates that stung me as well. 20 hour difference between time of actual download and time of reported download. Something obviously didn't work properly that night.

geoffwnz

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#113382 27-Feb-2008 17:59

Hmmm, actually, that would explain why we had 1GB of downloading appearing on the meter during a time when no-one was actually at home.

As far as I can see, this isn't really acceptable to be billing the usage at a different time to that in which it is accrued.

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sjadd

61 posts

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#113503 28-Feb-2008 11:16

Well they got back to me yesterday and confirmed that there was a problem on the 20th resulting in the inaccurate metering. I can't remember the exact reason off-hand (I'm at work so can't check). Something to do with an outage/equipment failure.

The end result is, although they can't move the data from the 21st back to the 20th, they will issue a balance credit for up to the first 2.7GB if I exceed my threshold this month. So credit to TC for fronting up on this.

To anyone in the same boat, it may be worth contacting them if you haven't already. At the end of the day, all it took from me was 1 email spelling out the issue (i.e. no phone queues) and a few days waiting while they investigated it.

geoffwnz

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#113505 28-Feb-2008 11:27

Good work. :)
Mine didn't cause me any issues other than intrigue as to who was downloading large amounts of data while no-one was home.
Seems likely that it would have been my flatmates WoW patching the previous evening.

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raytaylor

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#114957 5-Mar-2008 23:37

Slingshot's used to be like this - would take one or two days to count the data. When you go through 3 or 4 gb a day that means your throttled back to 128k (really 28k) on the first day of the month.

They have fixed it now. Telstra should also.

Ray Taylor

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