Bennetts Road Norman Park,
originally uploaded by troykelly.

It’s amazing, just how quickly the water is coming up. I took this about 20 minutes ago just near our place at Bennetts Road.

You can’t charge your customers for something that they can’t manage. It’s pretty simple. Do you think a service station could get away with not putting meters at the pumps?

Data Usage Monday

Yesterday afternoon my 3G USB stick suddenly slowed down. This isn’t abnormal on the Gold Coast where it would appear that Telstra‘s contention ratio is pretty poor – but because it sad to neatly at 24k up and down I thought I might have gone over my data usage limit.

I had just upgraded plans the week before – same dollar cost – double the data, and since the upgrade had only really been doing actual work on my stick – SSH sessions mostly working on our VoIP servers.

When we upgraded plans, the operator performing the upgrade said that the online usage meter would not reflect the changes correctly because we were updating mid plan, but gave no indication that the SMS or Email data usage alerts would not work. Obviously – I would be relying on those alerts – given I couldn’t rely on the online meter.

When I logged in and saw that I had allegedly used over $18,500 worth of data – I was a little shocked.

I immediately called Telstra to find out what the issue was. It was pretty apparent from the usage meter page  that the product had just not been applied. But what concerned me was the volume of data in excess of what we had purchased.

After two attempts at talking to Telstra staff, the first call either dropping out or being hung up on, and the second call the operator not wanting to deal with it – I resigned myself to waiting until today.

I called again this morning, disappointingly to find that Telstra’s 125111 number was not working properly. The IVR was offline and just routing calls to BigPond Customer Support (why – I have no idea). After speaking with no less then four customer service agents I ended up talking with Luke.

Data Billing - Tuesday

While explaining all the issues, I logged back in to Telstra.com and tried to check my usage, and was presented with their typical error page.

I kept tinkering around refreshing, logging out and in etc while Luke was investigating – then eventually I was presented with today’s version of my usage.

Obviously vastly different to yesterday, and bearing to resemblance to the prior figures in any way shape or form.

I was told that there was nothing that could be done until a bill was issued, and then we would have to raise a complaint. Luke is going to remind himself to follow up after the 22nd and get back to me.

I am however left with no 3G stick to use for connectivity now, because I really just can not trust the Telstra usage meter or alerts system. I checked again yesterday with the Telstra software – and there were no SMS’s or email’s about my usage and the online meter is obviously useless.

If we are paying for a service, that can potentially cost a fortune when used to excess – how are we meant to manage that with no tools at all?

[UPDATE Wednesday 5 January 2011]

Even more usage, with the modem turned off?

This morning I decided to check my data usage again – and even though I have had the device turned off, unplugged and in my bag since noticing the issue – I have some how used even more data.

If you have a Telstra 3G device – and you are getting charged data overages – refuse to pay. Their system is obviously faulty and can not be trusted.