Problems with Telstra's telephone lines

Last modified: $Date: 2006/07/20 03:36:45 $

In the Adelaide Hills, you now get a choice of telephone carrier, but there's no choice in who supplies the copper: it's Telstra. On the whole, the service is pretty good, which is a doubly good thing: when the phones fail, they tend to all fail at once and take forever to be repaired. In the process, they almost never honour the legislated Customer Service Guarantee. As of June 2005, despite my efforts at publicity, they have honoured it only once on six occasions. My letters to my local Federal MP, the Hon Alexander Downer, do not seem to have been able to change this situation.

The problem appears to lie with the organization of the company. They all consist of independent groups who don't seem to speak the same language, let alone attempt to speak to each other. In addition, it's almost impossible to achieve any continuity: they must be the only big company I know which doesn't have a postal address.

This page gives an overview of the problems we've had over the years.

November 1998: five days of line outages
October 2000: five consecutive days of line outages
November 2000: Line outage due to backhoe damage. This is the only time Telstra has ever honoured the legislated Customer Service Guarantee. It's tempting to think it's because they found somebody else to pay for it, or maybe because they had digging equipment on site.
February 2003: One week line outage. I wrote a lot of detail about this one, since it was so disruptive and indicative of complete inability and incompetence on the part of Telstra.
July 2003: 5 calendar days line outage
June 2005: no resolution within the terms of the Customer Service Guarantee.
July 2006: The first time they ever fulfilled the Customer Service Guarantee for a cable fault.

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