Telstra ADSL fades to black

Similarly, New South Wales customers have been unable to connect to ADSL services, however Telstra service representatives cannot agree on the cause of the problem.

NSW customers that contacted iTNews said the service went down on Sunday and Telstra promised that the issue would be fixed by Sunday night, however the service is still down.

A notice on Telstra's service status website reads: "We are currently having problems with Broadband ADSL." The notices state this is affecting customers in Victoria and NSW. As a result customers may experience authentication failures when attempting to connect. "Technicians are treating this issue as a priority and are working on the problem," stated the website.

In Victoria, this problem started on Sunday May 11 at approximately 11:50am and is not expected to be fixed until Wednesday May 14 according to the website. In NSW, the service was affected twice on Tuesday, according to the notice.

Similarly, a recorded message on the Telstra ADSL service helpline said Telstra was unable to determine when the problem will be fixed.

Telstra public affairs manager Kerrina Lawrence said this was due to a tunnel reset, but insisted this problem was specific to Victoria only.

Disgruntled customer Marcel Jadouin, managing director of seafood importer and buyer Great Ocean Products, told iTNews "we're in damage control."

Great Ocean Products use the service to connect its Coffs Harbour-based branch office with its head office in Sydney for invoices and orders.

"We've lost the entire sales of the day over the past three days," Jadouin said. "Telstra won't take our calls. They are playing us a recorded message that just tells us to wait."

"If I didn't have to use it, I wouldn't have put it in. If there was cable available, I wouldn't use ADSL," he said.

The network administrator for Great Ocean Products', who requested anonymity, said: "Anyone who stays logged in can use the service but [it appears] the login servers have died. It seems that if you stayed on, you are OK but the system can't make new connections or logins." The administrator, who is working from the Coffs Harbour office, said the VPN link back to the Sydney office worked for three hours Monday and hasn't worked since.

The service in NSW has now resumed, according to Jadouin, going live again around 4pm. He said "Telstra appears to think this is my fault because if I had stayed connected I could continue to use the service. But we had to move the modem, and that meant unplugging it. Since then we've been unable to "authenticate" which means no service, until 4pm today."