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However, if you think you're entitled to a refund you have to go begging, cap in hand to an Xtra webpage and then jump through hoops to prove your entitlement.

This means, as reported in the tabloid press, Telecom have reneged on a previous claim that customers need do nothing to claim their compensation.

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Obviously lots of Xtra customers are not best-pleased at the way Telecom have handled this fiasco.

Not only is three or four days an awfully long time to be without access to the internet, especially email -- but $3.25 is a piddly amount of compensation for the outage.

I seem to recall one of the claims made for DSL by Telecom is that "it's "always on" (as stated on this page), maybe they ought to revisit that statement.

But what other claims made by Telecom have been blown out of the water by Xtra's recent stuff-ups?

Well one eagle-eyed reader spotted some interesting elements of Telecom's residential terms and conditions that are worthy of investigation...

Section 15 contains a statement that:

"We have given you a commitment to fix at no charge all faults on our network or in equipment you rent from us which are not caused by you"

"If you are still without a Telecom service because of a fault in any of these things more than 24 hours after you tell us about the fault, or if we miss an arranged visit, call us on 120. You can choose either a credit to your Telecom account of one month's worth of your Telecom residential line rental or $50 worth of PhoneCards"

Based on this, I would expect that being without your Telecom-provided broadband service for more than 24 hours qualifies you for a month's free line rental or $50 worth of phone-cards -- not a meagre $3.25.

Right now I'm sure someone's thinking "but hey, this was a fault at *XTRA* and not on Telecom's DSL network so that won't apply right?

Well if you check out the "Xtra Broadband Terms" you'll see that it says "Xtra JetStream is also subject to Telecom Standard Terms" and, wouldn't you know it, those "Standard Terms actually include the "Residential Terms and Conditions" originally quoted above.

Another interesting point is the apparent removal of the satisfaction guarantee that I claimed on a few months ago. Under this guarantee, Telecom would issue a single credit of up to $200 or so if you were dissatisfied with the performance of your broadband connection.

Strangely enough -- all mention of that has now vanished since the fiasco of earlier this month, I wonder why?

Okay, so Telecom have back-peddled like hell, gone back on their word, pulled their satisfaction guarantees and generally tried to make it not worth our while to apply for the miserable $3.25 compensation on offer -- so what can we do?

Well perhaps we should show them just how expensive it can be to play the scrooge?

I strongly recommend that *everyone* who was affected by this outage rings Telecom's 123 line and speaks to an operator about claiming a proper refund of a month's free line rental or $50 phone cards -- as per the terms of residential supply referenced in Xtra's own documents.

No doubt they'll argue that the terms of the Xtra service contract over-ride those of the Telecom Residential one -- but you should spend plenty of time debating this issue, quoting chapter and verse if necessary. Remember that operator time is a *cost* to Telecom and if enough people tie up their staff for long enough, they might just concede that it's going to hurt a lot more to play scrooge than it would do just to be fair and reasonable.

How many Xtra broadband customers are there? If each spent 20 minutes on the phone lobbying their case, that would cost Telecom a small fortune and totally destroy the economic advantage of trying to duck the call for *fair* compensation.

Let's put Telecom's new claims to "play fair" to the test shall we?

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