Terrible Broadband Service & Customer Support from Telstra: Part 1

I’ve thought about not posting this a few times but my patience is now fully exhausted thanks to the quality – or lack of it – of service from Telstra here.

Just over 3 weeks ago I shifted to another house that’s about 2 or 3 blocks down from my previous address. Before moving we made arrangements for the Phone number and internet connection (which was ADSL 2+) to be transferred to the new address. Now this is where it all started (and continues to) go wrong.

After moving to the new address and having the phone number connected I had to ring up to notify Telstra that the phone is up and running so that the internet can get activated. THIS took about 12 business days to happen with me having to call Telstra several times during that period to sort things out. Here’s a quick summary of some of the things that caused this to take so long.

– I talk to a customer support person on the first day the phone gets connected and they say that all has been sorted and that I should have internet connectivity within 3 business days.
– 3 days or so later I call again after finding out that there’s no internet connection so I ring again
– I get told by the person I spoke to this time that apparently no order was put through and apparently we only arranged to get the phone number transferred but not the internet!! WTH? and that an order needs to be put through to transfer the internet, and I get put on hold for the customer support person so that they can put an order through. During this time as a result of call waiting on my phone my call with the operator got disconnected.
– After getting disconnected I ring again to ensure that the order went through and all is confirmed ok.
– 2 days later I ring again to follow up on the progress and I get told by the operator that NO ORDER has actually been put through and that I have to wait another 3 business days for the internet to be connected. Apparently when my call got disconnected while I was on hold with an operator they CANCELLED the order!!!!!! and yet after I rang again on the same day the last person I spoke 2 has not mentioned anything about this!

Anyways to cut the story short, after a few more days of calling Telstra and speaking with several different people and getting confusing information …etc …etc I finally had some internet access and even though I’m supposed to be on an ADSL 2+ service I was getting about 300Kbps speed but the person I was speaking to at the time (Friday) said that my service is currently running at about 70% but will reach full speed when it’s at 100% which should happen by Monday afternoon.

So ok, I’ll wait to see what happens on Monday.

Stay tuned for part 2. The story gets worse… by a lot. I wonder if anyone at Telstra listens to the supposedly recorded customer calls to improve their customer support and service.