More Telstra/Bigpond arrogance

It used to be routine that when you signed up with an ISP, you got a few extras as well as internet access. In particular you got help and hosting for a homepage plus some webspace for putting up files. More recently, a facility for creating and hosting a blog has become common. Telstra has provided all 3 of those to their users for some time. But no more! They have unilaterally and without notice decided to withdraw all but the blogging facility!

And that facility is a poor one. I used to make some use of it but they often seemed to turn it off at night! Since night-time in Australia is daylight in lots of other places, that was no good to me and I abandoned it.

Sadly, the way they can get away with such contemptuous treatment of their customers is that their many much smaller competitors are pretty bad too. Their competitors are cheaper than Telstra but the service can be even worse than Telstra as far as I can tell. The setup used to be that the little guys competed on price and Telstra competed on quality. Telstra provided the better and more reliable service at a premium price. Now they all seem to be crap. If a quality ISP pops up somewhere I will dump Telstra.

And the ISP part of the Telstra service is high-handed too. My service is a cable one and it was out of action for nearly two days recently. That is a LONG time to fix a cable fault. And enquiring about when it might come good was extremely frustrating. The answer you get on their technical enquiry line is a type of answering machine which assumes that any problem is the fault of the customer, not the fault of Telstra. So they make you go through a whole rigamarole of checking your modem etc and assume at the end of it that you are back on air. There is NO facility to tell them that their fixes did not solve the problem! Amazing.