BuddeBlog

ADSL2+ out of reach of most customers
My message about Telstra offering nationwide ADSL2+ was received with great enthusiasm by my son’s family in Wagga Wagga. He had been waiting for this for some time and I suggested he check the availability with Telstra, as I knew that the exchanges had already been enabled in Wagga a long time ago.

So when I visited him last week I asked him about his progress. Yes ADSL2+ was available but roughly at twice the price he currently pays for the ADSL+ service from Primus. He contacted Primus and was told that Primus (and others) were prevented by the ACCC from having access to Telstra’s ADSL2+ on a wholesale basis, so there would be no way of establishing any competition out there.

Disconnect and reconnect – weeks without broadband
Furthermore he was told that if he wanted the new service he had to formally disconnect his ADLS+ service and reconnect to the ADSL2+ service – and that this reconnect could take up to two weeks (I have heard of cases where, as we speak, this is even taken longer).

My son was furious, but I was not surprised. Telstra is a champion at making people angry – sometimes it looks as though it does this deliberately, I am less conspiracy theory inclined and maintain that it is just an ongoing massive stuff-up. On the other hand, to protect its own business from such unfair competition the ACCC has forced Telstra’s competitors into desperate action, which is leading to these undesirable situations; they certainly are not in a hurry to assist their customers in going back to Telstra.

Excuses and more excuses from the industry
I was more concerned by the fact that the appalling level of customer service was played down by several members of an industry panel convened at the annual ATUG conference in Sydney. Rather than exploring the issue they came up with all kinds of excuses.

For example, it was said that most customer complaints about telecoms services were not real complaints. One example given was that a change of ringtones between different carriers had led to complaints, which, according to some members of the panel, were not ‘real’ complaints. The appalling fact that our industry attracts the largest number of complaints of any industry in the country was then completely sidetracked into a discussion focusing on these issues.

When I called out ‘excuses, excuses’ from the floor I was told to be quiet. However several people came up to me afterwards and indicated that they very much endorsed my comment.

Conflicts of interest
Fortunately we have a Minister who has indicated that he will personally take the initiative to involve the users more. However, this was challenged by the Communications Alliance as being totally unnecessary, since they were looking after the customers. Most people at the conference remained unconvinced of this and the ensuing panel discussion, as well as some examples from the floor, only served to reinforce the need for a far more serious look at the problem.

I can’t help but conclude that organisations such as CA may have too much of a conflict of interest. On the one hand they look after the interests of the telcos, who are their members, and on the other they have to protect the customers through undertakings and codes of conducts. That, in itself, is a problem also, as a conflict of interest exists between the members.

Recently the ACCC were forced to intervene as the organisation seems to be unable to come up with self-regulation in the area of ULL and line sharing, where, of course, on one side of the table we have Telstra as the provider of those services, while the other side consists of the rest of the industry as access seekers.

Australia – the land of excessive broadband charges
Another issue that I certainly would also classify as a customer service was addressed by Taylor Reynolds from the OECD.

He showed statistics with a focus on the Australian market. He illustrated the enormous cost of data caps in Australia by giving his own personal example of downloading the series Ugly Betty 10.35 GB.

To download this series in Australia using broadband packages from Telstra and Optus one would reach the monthly data cap within minutes! So nearly immediately the excess data rate of AUS$0.15 per additional MB would kick in and the total download would cost AUS$1.552. And, at a drop-down speed of 64Kbit/s, it would take six days to download.

Many of these customer issues could be rather simply addressed if there was proper competition in the market, that would very rapidly sort the industry out. There would be very little need for regulations if we had a properly functioning telecommunications market place.

Paul Budde

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 10:51 am and is filed under BuddeBlog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.