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Telecom Refunds $8 Million for Bad Service
Gearu writes in with an article about a hefty refund coming to New Zealanders. It opens, "Telecom New Zealand has admitted it made an error with its Go Large broadband plan and is to credit customers of the service. An internal technical review of the service, launched in October, identified an issue with how internet traffic was being managed on the plan. The Go Large plan was promoted as having traffic management applied to certain applications, but since December the traffic management process had affected all forms of activity.
With around 60,000 customers on the Go Large service, the refunds were expected to total $7.5 million to $8.5 million."
If only they'd give us refunds for bad service here in the US...
Somehow I doubt you'll ever see any of the major US carriers make such an unsolicited refund.
I have to think about moving to NZ. Honest businesses.
which is something like USD 42?
Go Large was promoted as having traffic management applied to certain applications, but since December the traffic management process had affected all forms of activity.
Can someone enlighten me what was it supposed to do and how it failed?
It seems that they were trying to institute dl/ul speed caps on only certain types of traffic (probably BT, servers, and other P2P), but they ended up capping all the traffic instead due to an error.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
from the whoops-our-bad dept.
Just out of interest, what is the etymology of "my/our bad"? Our bad what? Mistake?
Get your own free personal location tracker
- thats no joke - it actually is so - the single monopoly backbone provider (turkish telecom) has recently oversold adsl packages, and our download speeds are cut to 1/3 or so, with horrible 500 ms ping latency to europe. Yet, we still pay the same fee. If you go for a refund here in turkey, you get beaten and thrown out. Companies refunding customers is something that is not this country is accustomed to.
Read radical news here
That would be $2 for every person in the country!
"Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius." -Heinlein
8 million bucks. That should come out to just about .002 cents per person. Or maybe .002 dollars. Whatever, same thing.
$8,000,000 by 60,000 subscribers... $133 per person (or 13300 cents)
Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
The entire population of New Zealand is only around 4 Million.
Advanced users are users too!
That wasn't meant to be a literal calculation. More of a reference to bad telecom service. Guess I should have included link in original post.
Please note the following is my personal opinion and the facts when they finally come out may be slightly different: Telecom NZ was originally a state owned entity that was deregulated. Once operating as a private company they aggresivly defended their monopoly position (they owned all the copper to residences) to achieve the best return for shareholders possible. They did this successfully and became the largest single company on the NZ sharemarket. In the course of their aggresive business tactics they did however do their best to extract maximum value from their customers with minimum outlay. In the area of broadband this meant placing the minimum amount of equipment in their exchanges to deal with the customer load. This was achieved through the sale of limited speed/bandwith plans and high but undisclosed contention ratios. Telecom also defended their policies to legislators using FUD and standover tactics, however late last year the government anounced that the telecom industry was going to me more tightly regulated and the local loop unbundled. As part of the process and to try and attract a greater future market share telecom announced several improved broadband plans, including the go-large plan which was uncapped on both speed and bandwith. Unfortunately in many areas this meant that with the existing high contention ratio many users slowed to less than dial-up speeds. After high profile complaints and reports Telecom announced the refund you hear about. This is not something i would have expected from the 'old' telecom and is an encouraging sign. However due to their history i strongly believe that if they did not make this move voluntarily then they would have been forced into something similar by the NZ commerce commision. This is, i believe, telecom making the best of a bad PR situation. For a good example of telecoms attitude to its customers and their feelings in return see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGrKLNnGfZY Finally telecoms excuse for the problem was that traffic shaping bandwidth control that was supposed to be applied to P2P or similar loads was accidentally missaplied to all traffic. This will be proven i guess when they correct that mistake and we will see if users do get full speed.
For those who don't know the Go Large plan is an all-you-can-eat plan. This is unusual for NZ as most plans have some form of download & upload limit per month. Also, the plan was added after Telecom upgraded the national speed of adsl to 8MBit downstream and 512kbits upstream (though varies depending on distance from exchange and other factors).
The idea behind the plan that would make it work, was that download applications such as torrents would be throttled in some way. This is necessary, otherwise people on this plan are likely create a very heavy load, and degrade the service for others by using up all the pipe at their exchange - or possibly further upstream.
Also if ones data usage (upload & download combined) exceeds 700MBytes during peak times, you get heavier speed restrictions for a week or so.
The plan was advertised with details of these restrictions. From the article is appears that rather than restricting just torrents so forth, they restricted everything.
From memory the plan costs 49.95$NZ a month, so that puts the credit into perspective.
People in NZ often complain that Telecom has too much dominance in the market, but Telecom does have a pretty good track record for crediting if things go wrong.
My impression is that laws protecting the consumer in NZ are fairly strict on an international level.
The government has recently started making moves to regulate broadband service in NZ, so perhaps Telecom is being particularly proactive here to reduce the chance of being hit by a regulatory stick again.
Haha Verizon math. But seriously, what telecom has between 4 and 400 billion customers?
Go Large was a DSL plan where for $50/month, you would have download speeds as fast as your line can handle and an unlimited monthly data allowance, however if users consistently exceeded x M/GB between y and z hours, (I forget the numbers as I was not a customer of the plan), then Telecom would request that you move to another plan which would make them more money (presumably).
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
What really got to me was when they were watching a typical family on their view screen in the batcave, (Telecom and Big Brother are pretty similar actually) and they had maxed out their bandwidth allowance for the month. They speak (voice coming through the family computers speakers or something) and push a big red knob to "Go Large". Its all "New Zealand, you've been held back too long, now Telecom is giving you everything you need" despite the fact they are the ones calling 256k fast broadband.
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You insensitive clod! Republic of the Congo only has 3.999 Million!
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> Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
> The entire population of New Zealand is only
> around 4 Million.
4 millions of persons are more than enough. Any more than that and it will start to get crowded.
It is nice to be able to walk down a main street in a town and find the car (sic) stopping because you look like you want to cross the street.
That was my experience in Greymouth (on the West Coast of the South Island).
Funniest thread I've read in a long time. You have to love the moderators. They either have a great sense of humor (they modded him informative instead of funny) or they totally misunderstand. Kudos to all of you, especialy the faithful slashdotter who responded to the OP. Have a great day :D
Don't forget the crappy 128kbit upstream limit. Some customers didn't get a say, their old plans were discontinued and they were bumped onto the new plan. I lost my 192kbit upstream when I was bumped off my old plan onto the craptastic Go Large.
The NZ Consumer Supreme "I really don't give an ass" Award went to Telecom's Xtra this year.
Xtra have had a history of poor perforance.
After a few more mergers (Verizon, Quest, Rogers) I'm sure "at&t" will.
USD what-you get-if-you-multiply-six-by-nine
Geeky math jewelry!
There was nothing unsolicited about this! Thousands of complaints over many months. Many articles in the national papers about pathetic "Go Large" plan: many users experiencing 30 secodn delays before pages STAR loading, NO email, and transfer rates less than 10KB/s.
No - there was a MAJOR move against Telecom for a long time. The Telecommunications ombudsman was involved, and so was the Commerce Commission by way of the Telecommunications Commissioner and his department.
Telecom was FORCED into this. Nothing could be less like NZ Telecom than to give away money it doesn't have to. And, they HAD to.
Thankfully, I'm on their "Unconstrained" plan with 40 GB a month for $119.90 - but my upstream and downstream is limited only by the machines I connect with. I regularly see transfer rates in excess of 600Kb/s upstream and on a good server, I'll see better than 5Mb/s downstream, averaged over a 2GB file. No complaints about my connection - except how fucking pricey it is!
But they need all the money they can get: the CVD (Chief Value Destroyer) Theresa Gattung (ex-CEO, now CVD) is leaving with a multimillion dollar handshake, despite overseeing 2.5 billion dollars lost (stolen) from shareholders funds. The fact she stood at the Telecom Boardroom table for more than 5 years, with her fingers in her ears shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" over and over again, while the government shouted "Open Up or Be Legislated against" can't be more clear. She ignored the warnings, lost Mom-and-Pop investors many many hundreds of millions of dollars, and what does she get in return? Tar and feathers, and a blacklist for any CEO job ever? NO - she takes 5 million in cash, and laughs all the way to the bank.
Fucking bitch.
I would have fucked Telecom's users and shareholders over for a LOT less than that.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"