Telstra exchange upgrade could cause bill chaos

Telstra had planned to upgrade exchanges in Blacktown, Casino and Eagle Vale between midnight and 8am on Monday morning. However, the upgrade ran over schedule, and Telstra received a number of complaints from customers unable to access their service in those areas, a spokesperson for its BigPond Internet division said.

Another consequence of the upgrade was that customers in other areas were also experiencing difficulties in browsing Web sites. Telstra placed a separate notice on its service support site noting that "customers in New South Wales may be having difficulty downloading data from the Internet" at 10:14am.

When the site was updated at 7:00am on Tuesday morning, that disruption notice was still in place. Around 8:00am Tuesday, Telstra replaced the notice with one stating that the problem had been resolved at 4:00pm the previous day.

The difference in times could prove critical to customers hoping to receive a rebate for disrupted service under Telstra's ADSL Customer Service Level Guarantee. The six-hour outage implied by Telstra's postings would not fall below the 99 per cent threshold required for a rebate, but the 22 hours between the original notice and the posting of the updated message would qualify customers for a 10 per cent rebate on monthly fees.

Telstra calculates the rebates automatically based on customer records, the BigPond spokesperson said, adding that Telstra would investigate why there had been a delay between fixing the problem and posting that information.