This page describes one of the most serious problems I have had with Telstra's NextG wireless Internet service: the data traffic accounting is demonstrably wrong. See the main page for details of other serious issues.

The problem starts with the fact that the software for Microsoft is completely out of sync with the usage meters on Telstra's (broken, of course) web site. Due to its extreme bugginess, I have not been able to confirm whether the same problems occur on Apple, but I expect so. The following screen shots were taken at the same time. They show the “connection manager”, which runs on the Microsoft box, and the Telstra web site with what purports to be correct usage information.

• The “connection manager” shows a quite respectable 3 bars of signal strength, and it transfers data happily. But it also displays the claim “No signal”.
• The link has been up for almost exactly 4 days (this part is correct). During this time, the “connection manager” claims that I have received 187 MB of data, and the uplink traffic was 54 kB.
• The web site has a different point of view. It's not 100% possible to compare, since it gives only a daily sum, but according to it, in the previous 5 days I have downloaded 158.88 MB, some of which would clearly have fallen outside the 4 days during which the “download manager” claims that I have downloaded 187 MB. On the other hand, it claims that I uploaded 20.1 MB in the past 3 days. In short, there's little comparison between the figures.

  These images have been reduced in size. To see progressively larger versions, click on the image.

  

• The usage information on the web site sometimes goes backwards. The extracts of the web page below were taken in the sequence shown intervals; unfortunately there's no date information on that page to confirm this, but there's no way that these images can be sorted which won't show either the download or the upload rate going backwards.

  

  

  

• Both versions of accounting software count traffic even when none is being transferred to the target machine. Possibly it's counting traffic between the modem and the base station, but if so, it's doing it wrongly, since it appears as chargeable traffic, though the terms and conditions make local traffic exempt.