Telstra Outage Causes Outrage

A Bigpond internet outage that affected a suburban neighbourhood in southern Perth for almost a week has raised questions about Telstra’s customer complaint handling systems. Residents from Safety Bay, Rockingham, have complained that their BigPond ADSL broadband connection suffered an outage from 29 August until the night of 3 September. The outage, which one resident said Telstra confirmed to have affected 57 households in the neighbourhood, occurred after a hardware failure in the local exchange. Instead of notifying customers that the outage would last several days while a replacement part was flown in from the east coast, the telco left customers scratching their heads