ADSL, e-mail problems send ripple through BigPond

March 1, 2001

Telstra's ADSL customers throughout Australia have had services restored earlier this week after an undisclosed technical problem saw many of them lose access.

Telstra Internet spokesman Stuart Gray said the company's ADSL customers were plagued with intermittent authentication server problems which caused congestion in lines supplying ADSL connections at the weekend.

He said customers were unable to connect for hours at a time. Gray was unable to say how long access to the service was interrupted or when normal service was restored.

Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) technology allows a normal copper telephone line to become a high-speed data line.

It significantly speeds up Internet connections compared to a standard 56kbps dial-up modem.

News of the outage follows revelations today that less than 10 per cent of Telstra BigPond Internet service customers were affected by software problems that blocked access to e-mail on two separate days.

The Australian reported today that customers with account names starting with the letters I, L or M had not been able to access e-mail services in the last week.

However, Gray said customers were able to send, but not receive, e-mails over a four-hour period on both Friday of last week and Monday this week.

He said a power fault in a server on Sunday of last week sparked problems in BigPond's e-mail stores that did not surface until Friday.

“For a while (after the power fault) nothing happened, and then we realised there was a problem,” Gray said.

“No e-mails were lost, and the problem was fixed on Monday evening. It was definitely not a virus,” Gray said.

The e-mail stores are used as a holding bay for account users' emails that are sent to the user while the account is offline.

BARRY PARK, FAIRFAX IT

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