Jimmy's weblog

It seems more Telstra talks about changing, the more it stays the same.

Every week there is another horror story about Telstra’s quality of service, pricing or predatory behaviour. I recently stumbled across an email I sent to our Federal Minister for Communications, Richard Alston, (also known as the World’s Biggest Luddite) about eighteen months ago. The content is still applicable now…

Dear Senator Alston,

I am writing to you today to complain about Telstra’s latest attempts to use
their effective monopoly power to cripple broadband internet access in an
attempt to further their profits.

I have been a Telstra broadband cable customer for two years. I originally
signed up for an unlimited download contract for a period of two months.
During the period I have been with Telstra, I have been subjected to
numerous contract changes, price increases, the introduction of download
limits followed by the lowering of these limits, and other monopolistic
behaviour.

In the last week Telstra has announced an increase in the monthly pricing
for my service from $72.95 to $87.95 - an over 21% increase. Although this
does remove the artificial speed cap of 512kb/sec for downloads that Telstra
had previously placed on these accounts, it offers no other benefits for the
price increase. Given that downloads from the internet are always less than
512kb/sec, the removal of the speed cap is useless for end users, and even
if it was useful it would simply enable them to reach their data limit more
quickly.

Telstra’s cable service has been more reliable than their well-documented
joke of an ASDL service, though cable users have still been subjected to
regular network dropouts, email delays, and other technical problems.

Interestingly the pricing for their ADSL service has also changed massively
in the last week and is now priced significantly higher than the cable
service despite using existing telephone line infrastructure.

Why this seemingly illogical pricing structure? Surely it would be cheaper
for Telstra to install and maintain the cables used by everyone for their
land line telephone calls than it would be for them to do the same with the
more complex and expensive cables used to deliver cable TV and internet
access.

Could it be that Telstra plans to force the majority of people who want
broadband access to use ADSL rather than cable, and is therefore attempting
to introduce a premium price regime for the service? Or could it be the
pressure from the ACCC over the lack of pricing differentiation between
their wholesale and retail ADSL accounts? “Easy to fix. We’ll just raise
the price of our retail service to increase the differentiation from
wholesale prices. This will have the effect of giving us more profit from
customers as well as getting the ACCC off our back.”

Telstra’s customer service from broadband users is also a joke, with very
few calls being answered in less than ten minutes. Their level of technical
service is generally very low, with many users (including myself) knowing a
lot more about the technological issues involved in servicing a network. I
have had billing disputes with them over the amount of data being charged to
my account, and my emails have remained unanswered (and even unacknowledged)
for weeks at a time. I have repeatedly tried to visit their site
(http://bigpond.com/advance/) this afternoon to check account pricing and my
monthly usage and the server has been giving errors.

Although Telstra appears to the ACCC to have not abused its monopoly power
in this market, there are certainly a large number of customers who
disagree. The repeated breaking of contracts, artificial slowing of the
service, introduction and subsequent lowering of download limits, and
massive price increases from Telstra while costs are falling the broadband
markets in other countries certainly leads me to believe Telstra are abusing
their market position.

In another yet another unbelievable move, Telstra has also recently added a
clause to the contract which states “7.4 You agree that usage reports will
not be made available detailing your actual usage.”. So we are meant to
accept a volume based billing system, without being able to check the data
we are being charged for? It is bad enough that their usage system has been
proven by many customers to be completely inaccurate, but now they to get
rid of it completely?

A visit to http://whirlpool.net.au will give you some idea of the outrage
and helplessness that users of Telstra’s broadband services feel. We would
all dearly love to leave Telstra, but for the majority of us there is no
other service provider we can turn to. We are obviously happy to pay
premium prices (as we already are) for a premium service (which is what we
receive SOME of the time), but we are not happy to have the quality of our
service reduced while prices are increased.

In short, we have nowhere to turn in our attempt to raise awareness of
Telstra’s latest profit grab. We would appreciate any investigation you can
make in this area.

Thank you for your time,

James