BigBlog

That's it. Once again this BigBlog blog would not come up late at night. Amazing that Australia's largest provider of internet services cannot keep its own blogs up and running 24 hours a day -- but that is the reality, folks.

So from now on I will be putting up all my comments about Telstra/Bigpond on the much more professional Blogspot platform. Go here from now on. I have already transferred there the more recent posts on this BigBlog site.

I will not however delete this blog. I will keep it as an archive and I may find some use for in on a distant day when Telstra get it working properly.

I was getting really cranky about the failure of this blog to load at night and I had already prepared an alternative site to go to here.

But it seems that Telstra has at last seen the light regarding that matter too. This site loaded reasonably promptly last night. So I will continue to post here.

I am getting a bit cheesed off at the continued silence of the Telstra "Referral Centre", though. I am getting pretty close to seeking the intervention of the TIO -- just to get the b*stards to reply to my letter.

It's happened again. I could not access this blog late at night. That is SO primitive it is unbelievable. One more such night and I will transfer operations to blogspot. Blogspot is a much more sophisticated and easy-to-use platform anyway. I just thought it was rather neat to use Telstra's own blogging service to post criticisms of them.

And Google scan blogspot sites with amazing speed: They often have a post within an hour or so of it going up. The fact that they own blogspot is obviously relevant.

Francis. I am putting this memo on the net only as I am pretty sure you will be reading it soon.

I have come across what seems to be yet another colossal piece of Telstra incompetence. I have tried several times to access my BigBlog site late at night and have found that it just will not come up -- even if I wait some time. I have tried accessing it from several points on the net but still with no success.

Is Telstra back in the Menzies era with an assumption that everybody who counts is in bed by 11pm Australian Eastern Time? Surely everyone knows that the internet is a 24 hour affair. It has to be. What is late at night in Australia is early morning in America -- and Americans DO read Australian sites.

So turning off BigBlog late at night is both bizarre and unprecedented in the world of blogging. I am hoping that it is only a temporary aberration, though. Could you get someone at BigBlog to ring me on (07)33914168 and tell me what the heck is going on?

I have of course saved everything on my BigBlog blog to disk and can easily recreate it on a more mature blogging platform if need be

TO:

FRANCIS CROYDON

CEO liason

Telstra

Francis

I said something nice about you on my blog yesterday. See here:

http://libertas.bigblog.com.au/

The blog now has quite a few links on the net so will gradually move up the Google page-rankings and thus be read by more and more people. Try googling "Francis Croydon" for instance.

I have not yet had any response from your Referral Centre. You will find a copy of my letter to them in my blog entry of Dec 3rd. You might consider ringing them and encouraging them to see the light. The amount of money involved is tiny and it will cost Telstra more and more in man-hours as this matter goes on. The TIO will be my next port of call if Telstra is pigheaded.

You might want to note my blog entry of Dec 5th. as as example of what I might write to the TIO. My Optus landline is 3391 4168 if the Referral Centre people want to ring me.

T*LSTRA'S B*gPond internet service has bombed in Australia's biggest consumer technology survey, which canvassed the opinions of more than 14,000 people. those who rated the B*gPond service, less than a third believed they received value-for-money and only one in two would recommend the internet provider to a friend, according to the results published in PC Authority this week. "In every category we asked 'Would you recommend the product' or 'Would you buy it again', and pretty much no-one did that badly across the board," said PC Authority editor Nick Ross. "It was only in the ISP (internet service provider) category, where three of them did that badly - T*lstra, Xtra and Dodo."

B*gPond rated poorly on customer service and value-for-money, but two thirds of respondents said they were satisfied with the service's reliability. Xtra and Dodo received the lowest score possible for almost every category.

"Dodo's a far smaller company. T*lstra's one of the biggest tech companies in Australia, if not the biggest," Ross said. "We said last year that T*lstra was the worst tech company in Australia. It probably still is - considering the size and resources it has - if it's getting scores like that."

The magazine named Westnet the highest-rated ISP and gave runner-up Internode a "highly commended" mention. Ross said it was likely that T*lstra's negative reputation among broadband internet users had an effect on the survey results. "People blame T*lstra for most of all broadband problems, but they still feel that they have to use it because there's little choice out there," he said. "Two-thirds or so were happy with (B*gPond's) reliability, so they weren't just panning it across the board. They were actually putting some thought into their answers."

Phil Sweeney of Australian broadband community Whirlpool said the results were consistent with consumer sentiment and recommended people research a range of service providers before deciding on a broadband plan. "The main problem with the B*gPond plans is that they usually aren't value-for-money. What they rely on is their advertising budget," he said. "A lot of people don't even realise that there are hundreds of ISPs out there, and most of them have better plans and better value-for-money."

B*gPond corporate affairs manager Craig Middleton dismissed the PC Authority survey and said its structure had encouraged people to express extreme opinions. Surveys that rely on people being motivated to respond skew the responses between those who love their ISP and those who have had a poor experience," Mr Middleton said. "The vast majority of B*gPond customers have a reliable, good value, always-on broadband service that they probably spend no more time dwelling upon than their water or electricity service."

Mr Middleton said B*gPond staff were regularly tested by a customer experience assessment company and the provider had been ranked first in a comparison of Australian ISPs. In October consumer group Choice found B*gPond customers were less likely to be satisfied with their internet plan than users of other major ISPs. B*gPond users were the least satisfied with the cost of their ADSL, ADSL2+ and cable broadband plans.

Source

When you play hardball, as T*elstra does, with a whole range of your constituents, including politicians, regulators, the law, competitors, shareholders and even consumers, you face the possibility of an equally harsh response. That is what it received yesterday.

Until now T*lstra has displayed aggressive behaviour towards many of these groups. Its historical relationship with the previous Coalition government has been nothing short of toxic, as have its public brawls with the regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. T*lstra has tried to justify this posture of pushing the bounds of its regulatory and legislative restraints in the name of improving returns for its shareholders. But the concept of this shareholder-centric behaviour blew up a month ago when a majority of investors voted down the pay package for chief executive Sol Trujillo and the board chose to ignore them and push it through regardless.

That doesn't mean T*lstra management is not attempting to maximise profits, it just means that shareholders' views run a poor second to management's personal financial prospects. Only time will tell whether keeping the management happy and financially well rewarded was worth the sacrifice.

But yesterday's news was all about the most important T*lstra constituents - its customers. And the Federal Court ruled that this group has been dudded. Justice Michelle Gordon delivered a judgment that T*lstra had misled consumers about the available coverage of its Next G mobile network. The commission took action against T*lstra in September, claiming the company had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct courtesy of claims that the Next G network had coverage "everywhere you need it". (We have all experienced being in a tall building, a lift, or a remote location and losing reception.) In reality, there are plenty of places that the signal cannot be received.

The advertisements that make these claims will probably need to be withdrawn, as the commission will seek injunctions to stop these representations from being made any more. Relief orders have not yet been made. The damage to T*lstra will not be financial; it will be to its image among customers.

In terms of commercial gains, the really big actions being fought by T*lstra are on the battleground of regulatory pricing. It wins some and it loses some, and there are already plenty clogging the court lists. These decisions potentially make a big difference to T*lstra's profits and they are hard-fought, with important commercial outcomes.

But there are other court actions to which T*lstra is a party that are considered questionable by investors and by the courts. In October T*lstra was spanked for using legal action as a tool to publicise its campaign against regulation - a court ruling denied it the chance to get secret documents from the then communications minister, Helen Coonan. It was all about Coonan's decision to award an Optus consortium a contract to build broadband in the bush. (This has been appealed.)

A recent decision in a class action about T*lstra's disclosure presented more of a victory as it was ordered to pay shareholders a mere $5 million against the hundreds of millions sought.

Meanwhile, T*lstra has initiated a constitutional challenge to the power of the Government and the commission to regulate the prices it can charge its wholesale customers. The list of actions taken by and against T*lstra is long - some are long shots, some are small and some are incidental. But yesterday's judgment is about reputation. Plenty of small and large companies are accused of misleading and deceptive conduct - some inadvertent, some bold and risky.

For T*lstra the establishment of the Next G mobile network is the biggest display to date of the achievement of its new management. It's been done ahead of time. It's the big boast and the largest initiative to capture market share in any of T*lstra's markets. For those with 3G market coverage issues this news will come as no surprise, but those thinking of signing up or those that are annoyed that the existing CDMA network will be shut down will have some additional ammunition.

Source

When I pay for a service and find it poorly executed I normally write a polite letter to the service provider suggesting changes. Usually, however I get politely told to get lost. What amuses me however is that some months down the track I often note that my suggestion has been adopted -- without notifying me, of course. My usual bank, the Bank of Queensland has been particularly apt at that. I think I have got just about everything I asked for from them -- eventually.

And the same is true of Telstra/Bigpond. When they first made available the service you are now reading -- BigBlog -- it did not even have an option for uploading pre-coded html. If you did upload html, it was reproduced, not rendered. Can you imagine anything more hopeless than that in a blog? I of course complained and got told huffily that they had "no plans" to introduce a html facility. Yet just such a facility popped up earlier this year and has now made it worthwhile for me to use this blog.

The latest innovation that I have noticed is that they now have a blogroll facility of sorts. I wrote a couple of didactic letters to the long-suffering Francis Croydon about that -- which got zero response -- but I noticed recently that they now have a "Favourite links" feature. I have no idea WHEN it popped up but much searching revealed no such thing when I looked originally.

In a recent unanswered letter I also insisted that a blogroll facility had to be on the front page and I now note that the "Favourite links" feature is now to be found there -- as well as being a menu item. It could be however that the front page feature only appeared when I first used the menu item concerned.

The facility is still a poor one as you have to enter links by hand one at a time. On my other blogs I just copy and paste a whole list at a time into a new blogroll. Maybe that facility will silently pop up on BigBlog some time soon as well.

I guess that somewhere deep in the ratlike recesses of their brains, these guys know that I am doing them a big favour by giving them a user's viewpoint and thus enabling them to improve their product but they are never big enough to acknowledge that.