SEP aka Someone Elses Problem.

So after I requested a further escalation point from Telstra, I received the following response:

I have spoken to several Telstra Departments today. I am sorry, but as you are not a BigPond Member, your ISP must be your escalation point. BigPond is unlikely to have connected you to ADSL on the phone line, due to the restrictions at the RIM. If your current service is not meeting your satisfaction, then I must refer you to your ISP.

Your current ISP must escalate any issues on your behalf. If any part of their service is not satisfactory to you, then you will need to communicate with them. I do understand your frustration and wish you well.

Did you catch that? You might have missed it. That was Telstra hiding behind the "you don't have a direct relationship with us" fairy. No, we don't. Telstra are correct.

However, the fault lies SOLELY with TELSTRA infrastructure. Internode have NO capacity, opportunity or ability to resolve this issue for us.

I particularly like the "if any part of THEIR service is not satisfactory to you". What complete bollox. Telstra KNOW that the issue is THEIR infrastructure, and NOTHING to do with Internode's portion of the service delivery.

Having said that, I was hoping Internode would have gone into bat for us just a little harder, instead of offering a templated hands in the air response like this:

I have looked through your fault tickets and I can see your service is affected by a congestion issue at your exchange. This requires our wholesaler to attend to a maintenance upgrade to there DSLAM at the Exchange.

I understand this is a frustrating time for you but unfortunately, we do not have any control relating to Telstra upgrading their infrastructure. We have had our Provisioning Investigations Team escalate this issue to Telstra, but we have not received and ETA yet for the upgrade.

As stated on our website and in our terms and conditions, Internode ADSL connections are not a service that we can provide an operational guarantee on, beyond the commitments made in our SFoA. We do guarantee that we will promptly investigate all matters brought to our attention and work with you to resolve any issues that we are able to; however, some things are simply outside of our control, such as those that occur within external networks and infrastructure and therefore we do not compensate for these issues.

We do apologise for this inconvenience and please be assured that we will be doing everything within our ability to keep escalating this issue to Telstra Wholesale.

So, just to summarise: Telstra say "not a bigpond customer, go talk to Internode", Internode say "nothing we can do, it's a Telstra problem".

And everyone pays full price up the food chain for a crippled service that works as intended a fraction of the time.

Wonderful.