Aardvark Daily

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Telecom loses a(nother) customer

1 December 2008

At around 9:30pm on Friday night, Telecom's broadband network fell over so hard that the majority of all internet users were left without service.

Although the DSLAMs were still working, attempts to establish PPP sessions were fruitless and people like myself, who were trying to get some work done or just surf the web, were effectively turfed out of cyberspace.

Now we all know that sometimes things go wrong.

Hardware breaks, software has bugs and people make mistakes, so it would be rather mean-spirited to simply use this most recent failure as a chance to bash Telecom.

However, where the difference between a good ISP and a lousy one comes is in how they handle such catastrophic failures of their systems.

And this is where I feel quite entitled to bash the living snot out of Telecom.

Like probaby tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of other Telecom broadband users, I wondered if the outage was specific to me or a more general fault condition so I tried ringing the helpdesk.

You'd think that whenever a failure occurs that affects a good number of people, the sensible thing to do would be to place a recorded message in the helpdesk queue so that at least people knew the issue was being looked into.

Not only does this keep your customers informed but it also means the helpdesk staff aren't overwhelmed by a million people, all reporting exactly the same fault.

But, when I rang the helpdesk all I got was a recorded message that said something along the lines of "Sorry, all our support people are busy right now, please try calling again later".

Well actually, the first time I rang the help desk I just got cut off -- no message, nothing.

I figured I'd try calling 123, since sometimes this number works when the direct line to the help-desk is busy.

However, I guess half the country also decided to do this because I got a different, but equally terse message telling me that they were so busy I wasn't even going into a "priority queue" and that I should ring back later.

About this time I figured that this was probably a major outage and that the helpdesk was simply drowning in people complaining -- so I went to bed.

So yet again I find myself asking "why the hell doesn't Telecom provide some kind of status message when their systems fail?"

How about a separate number that does nothing but report the status of the broadband network?

That could be a simple 10-second-long voice recording that says "she's buggered mate -- but we've got our best team of trained monkeys fiddling with the switches so hang-tight".

Instead of a small army of angry customers being left in the dark and crashing the (*OFFSHORE*) helpdesk, people could find out whether it's even worth ringing the help-desk in under 15-seconds.

Is there nobody at Telecom who even tries to come up with better solutions to the logistical nightmares that these kind of failures represent?

Was the whole disaster-management thing managed by a little subsistence-waged princess somewhere in Manilla or something?

And, when I got up on Saturday morning I found that although I had my DSL service restored, I still couldn't send any emails through Xtra's SMTP server.

Then even that page disappeared and all I got was an "unable to contact telecom.co.nz" browser page.

As I said right at the start -- bad things sometimes happen. However, don't you think that Telecom would have learned from previous "bad things" that their status reporting systems are just not up to scratch and that people get really pissed off when they're treated like mushrooms?

So, after many years of hanging on to my Xtra broadband connection simply out of inertia, I'm jumping ship.

Any ISP that can provide a reliable service and a support system that doesn't treat me like I'm a moron ("can you please be rebooting your computer") if I have a support request is welcome to contact me with an offer I can't refuse.

How do readers think Telecom handled this issue?

Has the outsourcing of the Xtra helpdesk to distant shores meant that there is now just another frail link in the chain that breaks whenever a major issue surfaces?

What about a "system status" hotline that does nothing but give an *accurate* and *up-to-date* report on any problems with the network? Given the number of times that Telecom's own system-status webpage has said "there are no known problems" during major outages that are hours old, could the company even be trusted to maintain such a message reliably?

Just how could Telecom improve its record when it comes to managing major outages in its broadband network?

What would have happened if this failure occured at 9am on a Monday morning?

Tell me about your ISP and whether you're getting the level of service and support you expect.

Let's have an informal poll and see which is the *best* ISP in NZ right now and why.

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