Beware of TELSTRA knocking on your door

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

SO, last night this young man comes past my house and rings the door bell. In very broken English he manages to tell me he is from Telstra and he is investigating some complaints by customers in my street. I am not a Telstra customer anymore but they manage my underlying infrastructure so I thought let's hear the man out. Over the last couple of weeks or so, I have experienced spurious carrier drops with my DSL modem so I shared this with him when he asked me if I had noticed anything lately. Between drop-outs there has been no noticeable problems. After having talked to him for a while he starts steering the conversation in the well known "I have something to sell you" direction. As it turns out, he just wanted to wast my time extra much by talking about problems in the infrastructure before the sales spiel but this one was interesting.

Knowing that I am using DSL (since I don't have a cable plan with Big Pond) he told me that my intermittent loss of carrier was because DSL is an inferior technology and that I should change to a Telstra cable modem plan instead. There were two reasons apparently, 1) cable modems are always much faster than DSL and 2) I experience loss of carrier because there is so much congestion during peak hours because my neighbours are using all my capacity.

I accept that I live in a city where I cannot even get away from sales reps in my home day or night, but having to endure blatant lies like this is just a sign of corporate management in absolute ethical crisis. I am lucky to understand this and being able to kindly decline but what about all those people who are not telecom people and who actually trust what an old reputable organisation like Telstra tells them? Telstra is so dominant on the Australian market that there is no need to resort to such methods. In fact, they can leave people alone in their homes at dinner time all together and still pay out good dividends.