Telecom's accused of giving a bit Xtra

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

An Auckland internet service provider has accused Telecom of giving preferential treatment to its Xtra customers over the same network that provides 0867 access.

David Gottschalk, owner of Birkenhead-based Web Internet, said that a customer testing both Xtra and Web Internet 0867 connections had achieved consistently higher connection speeds when accessing Xtra.

The Warkworth-based user achieved connection speeds of 44Kbps when hooking up to Xtra but only 31.2Kbps when using 0867 to connect to Web Internet.

Mr Gottschalk told the Business Herald that there could be "no other explanation" that Telecom was "discriminating against other [non-Xtra] customers."

"The tests were tried a number of times and in each case it was remarkable that there wasn't any variance in these results. The user was using the same hardware, same software and same terminating equipment."

Mr Gottschalk said that Telecom engineers were treating the difference in speeds as a "fault" when he reported it last Monday but Telecom staff were "still looking into it" each time he had called since then.

Web Link has also suffered at least six "major outages" where the 0867 service was not available to its customers at all, in one case for eight hours, according to Mr Gottschalk.

Telecom spokesman Glen Sowry said that any discrimination between Xtra and other internet providers was "absolutely not the case" and he did not believe that the problems were caused by the 0867 service.

He said it was usual to get different connection speeds when accessing the internet and that while Telecom was aware of Web Internet's problems it could not investigate them properly as it had not been supplied with the customer's name.

"If there is a consistent difference then we will most certainly look into it," he said.

Mr Sowry said that during a "productive and positive" meeting between Telecom and ihug last Friday a "number of misconceptions had been cleared up" and that Telecom would continue to work closely with ihug on resolving the issues.