I am one of millions of Telstra customers who foolishly believed “You get what you pay for” when it comes to Telstra services. After all, they’ve spent years trying to convince us punters that their offering is superior to any other and that we must pay a savage premium to enjoy it.
Despite much more attractive deals from competitors, I stayed away from the likes of Optus and Vodafail because they simply aren’t up to scratch. Right? Telstra tells us so while they wave the little pen over the dotted line of their confusing contracts.
For years I’ve put up with the sub standard customer service and shitty overseas call centres so I could enjoy the faster internet speeds, better coverage, 4G network and ability to ditch my landline. I’ve moved house multiple times and each time dealing with Telstra is a fucking nightmare filled with tearful phone calls, technicians that don’t show up, and conflicting information. Every. Single. Time.
Telstra says….Pay us double. We are better. We own the network. We invest more.
Earlier this year Telstra suffered a massive network outage which they blamed on ONE GUY putting a plug into the wrong hole. I can think of only one other industry where putting something in the wrong hole is acceptable. And even then it’s borderline.
What the actual fuck! How the hell do they not have measures in place for this kind of monumental fuck up? I call bullshit, Telstra.
Last Thursday night when Telstra had it’s second outage this year I got to experience again what it was like to be back in 1985.
Picture this. I leave a meeting in South Melbourne to get into the city where I will meet a friend I met on a plane a few months earlier. I get an Uber which I book using the app. I call The Husband who cautions me not to be hacked up into little bits on the way to the dinner where he will later meet me. Benny the Uber dude smells nice and he looks like he knows where he is going. I am happy. All is well.
I use the Telstra phone to find my friend (who has flown in from Canada) using google maps. Clever little thing hey? Amazing.
We find a spot in a tiny bar and start chatting. I go to call The Husband again to tell him where I am and cannot get through. It takes a good while before I realise the entire network is down and I can’t do anything. No phone, no data, no texting. Loads of people are standing around banging on their screens trying to get something to happen.
The Husband spends the next few hours imagining me hacked up in tiny pieces as the last time he heard from me I was in an Uber. As far as he knows Benny the nice smelling Uber dude has poked my chopped remains down a drain hole and driven off. Or the random Canadian friend from the plane has conspired with Benny the nice smelling Uber dude and they’ve both taken half of my chopped remains and strewn them all across Melbourne in a murderous frenzy. His mind is racing. He sends me a TEXT MESSAGE FROM A FUCKING PAYPHONE. Which is totally fucking useless because it doesn’t let me ring or text back. And it cost him fifty cents when a tin can and a bit of string would have been more useful at this point.
To cut a long story short the next few hours are spent furiously cursing Telstra and realising our entire species is completely fucked without technology. The restaurant can’t even accept payment because Telstra own those landlines that the Eftpos machines run through. I am trying to tether my phone to my friends phone just to use viber to call other people and try to track him down. Epic fail. Epic.
Then yesterday it happens again! And the spokespeople from Telstra say the outage only lasted for an hour and affected 500,000 people. Bullshit!!! The knock on affect is huge. Businesses lose money, people can’t get through to their loved ones, plans go awry, I personally know one person who was stuck on the side of the road with a broken down car. And we get offered a free data day? Fuck you!
Fuck You Telstra for ruining my night out and making my husband think I was dead. You owe me hours in lost conversation and frustration. Fuck You for making us pay a premium when you can’t even deliver. Fuck You for your crap overseas call centres and shitty contracts. Fuck You for trying to charge me a $15 late payment fee which you are never fucking getting. Fuck You for your continued and undeserved monopoly on the industry in Australia. Fuck You for your overpaid executives and Fuck You for your “wrong hole”.
THE END
I have to be with Telstra to be able to use my phone when I visit my parents in the middle of fucking no where. Up until this year I haven’t had a drama with them. Then I upgraded my phone. It took them a fucking week to reconnect my number to the network because I had to get a new sim. The only highlight of that week is that I got to witness an irate man in a Telstra store lose his shit because no one told him that sex lines are considered premium numbers so cost a billion dollars a minute.
I used to work for Optus a million years ago and had to be that person in the call centre explaining to old ladies that their too old to be living at home sons had been dialling sex hotlines.
Don’t pay you bill! I was told by a TELSTRA employee that they cannot legally make you pay for a service the cannot Provide.So don’t pay. No service no pay!
Hmmmm. Interesting!
Certainly not to that extent, and I commiserate with you, but did experience outage here for a couple of hours. Very frustrating when running a home based business! Well said!
I also run a business and it made the days with issues even more infuriating.
I work for NSW health. We rely on our phones for women to call when in labour. Our whole hospital was put on alert due to Telstra! We are talking about women not being able to call TO BIRTH THEIR BABIES!!! Over the Christmas period, we had a week of poor service, 3 women could not reach us, had to call ambulances to take them to an alternative hospital. NOT GOOD ENOUGH TELSTRA!
This is the sort of thing they just don’t care about. I would be so furious if I was in labour with no phone! Not acceptable!
Absolutely agree. I’ve had this argument with Telstra employees all the time. I was paying $120 a month for a 2GB Data Plan when other companies were offering better plans. Telstra claim to cover 99.3% of Australia whereas Optus covers 98.5%. 0.8% is not enough to warrant the extra charges.
Hopefully these outages force Telstra to wake up to the delusion that their network is far superior than their competitors and start offering competitive prices!
Spot on Tom!
Ok it is frustrating and very unlucky to happen three times within a short period, but I can tell you the Telstra network is far superior and worth the price. My personal phone is with Telstra and my work phone is with Optus. I work in Sydney CBD. Work phone always drops out and call quality is poor, but I don’t have any issues when using my personal phone. Switching to Optus was the worst thing work ever did. So thumbs up to Telstra.
i have a cpl of questions. ..
who wrote this ? do u have the balls to put ur name to it or do u want to hide behind ur alias.
Any chance u work for another telecommunications company? just a thought.
you may preach to the mindless masses with ur faceless words but come out and show ur self and the ppl that arent sheep may listen.
its sort of like the ‘pauline hanson’ syndrome.
grow up and have the gutz to put ur name to ur whinge!
I do not work for a telco. And I do have a name. It’s Far Kew.
Looks like it’s all tears.
Your phone fucks up and its the end of the world. Get a bit of perspective.
Why didn’t you just ask to use someone else’s phone and call your husband. Perhaps the friend that you were out drinking with? Anyone even? That’s what I did.
Would have solved the entire problem if for one second you used human interaction instead of crumbling because your tiny computer in your pocket was malfunctioning.
A whole lot of help writing this did.
God Bless You Dylan.
Dylan…you really are stupidly simple, aren’t you. Her husband couldnt receive calls anyway. If you are going to bag others, try using that mush that floats around inside your empty vortex before posting brainless posts.
Dylan….you are one simple idiot. The network was down, so her husband couldn’t have received the call anyway.
I hope you get shitted on by a bear.
Not too many bears in Melbourne Frank. But I’ll let you know if it happens.
So many sensitive little trolls in the world! The lovely Far Kew (I’m not sure, but I thought Kew was quite central – not that far from anywhere, but I digress) is completely entitled to both her opinion and her wisely chosen anonymity.
As for me personally, I was tempted to the dark side from Optus by an enterprising young sub-continental knocking at my door. He did a fine job of “turning” me, but there it ended. Telstra “technicians” subsequently butchered my home system, disabled my extensions, left me with a main line so dirty with static that it was unusable, and (wait for it) disconnected my home security line. When I called to complain I was given the run around for days, finally arriving at “Dave From Brisbane”, who told me it was my problem and nothing to do with them. I said I’d complain to management, and his highly sarcastic reply was, “Yeah, good luck with that.”
Instead I engaged the Telecommunications Ombudsman, who was very helpful, even to the point of telling me that Telstra, forever after known as The Evil Empire, are the focus of their attention FIVE TIMES MORE FREQUENTLY than their next competitor. The ombudsman supplied the number for the actual complaints centre at The Evil Empire, a number available from no other source than the ombudsman (i.e. The Evil Empire keep it secret) and my contract was duly cancelled and my money refunded.
Conversely, yesterday I called Optus to ask why my boss was not receiving my text messages on his Samsung, when other friends could. Not only did the lovely Mandip recognise the problem and provide the solution (the paranoid Samsung software thought I was spam because I message my boss multiple times a day), he called me back a few hours later to ask how I had gone with applying his solution. Can you pick the slight differences there?
This level of service was way above my expectations of a major telco, and just served to reinforce the stance I have taken ever since I so foolishly chose to give The Evil Empire that one, final, fatal chance all those years. Put simply, whenever I am doorknocked or cold called by T.E.E., my response is the same: I tell them, politely but very directly that I will, never, ever return to The Dark Side. I emphasise the point by adding that the price is irrelevant, that even if they offered to pay me, I will never, ever make that mistake again.
And, my trollish friends, I’m a primary school principal, not an Optus employee, nor a friend, relative, associate or in any other way connected to them. They are merely my service provider of choice, and always will be.
Nice one Ed. I can feel your majesty oozing out of that. Now teach those little kids that The Evil Empire is a cult!
I am 80 years old and I have been a Telstra customer for most of that time and I have never had any problem. The very few times that something went wrong they have immediately come at my request and fixed the problem! You must be talking about a different Telstra to the Telstra I know! Lawrie
Good on ya Lawrie, you must be one of the lucky few. Glad you found my site, sorry about the swearing. You are a good man!
As a family of four, two children that use a decent amount of Internet, and two adults studying for their Masters by distance education, I was also a Telstra customer and the phone and Internet service was shocking. Numerous phone calls, long waits for service, terrible customer service, eventually Telstra admitted that they could no longer spend money on maintaining their lines since NBN lines were due to be laid soon (due in our area in about 3 years). They literally said “we can no longer offer you a service” and withdrew services. Our area has slim pickings for alternate options, but after a couple of Internet free weeks, we managed to get some Internet. It’s not fantastic (uses Telstra lines) but it is all we have for now.
The part that bothers me most is that although they admit that their lines are terrible in our area with overcrowded lines, they still offer those lines on a contract. I struggle to see how that is ethical practice.
For those who think that complaining about lack of Internet is really a first world problem, well maybe. But with distance education requiring three hours a day of study, on top of my full time job, and paying a decent amount of money to be able to access my online content, it is a big problem for our family. Each subject costs me $5000, and there are two of us studying. In short, if I fail a subject because I cannot access the content, we have to pay a further $5000 each ($10,000) plus the $500 we have spent on Internet that doesn’t work. First world? Yes. Still important? Absolutely.
Telstra are absolutely hopeless when it comes to customer service. It only took them 7 weeks to connect my home phone and Internet after switching from Optus. Telstra told me that someone lived in the residence already and they couldn’t connect. It took me 7 weeks to tell them that I lived in the residence. It was like bashing my head against a concrete wall, trying to get them to stick one plug in a bloody hole. All this while I was paying for so called premium service.
I think a gold fish could have given me better customer service than Telstra.
Well done for writing the truth!
I am totally over this company, firstly they sold me a phone that wasn’t blue tick knowing I live in an area with very little signal and when I call to complain about coverage they finally offer to pay for half the cost of the phone! Pfffft fukn big hearted of them since they sold me a phoe I can’t use! Then we have all these fukn outages and we are still having them…lost shit loads of business and then they have the balls to charge an extra $15 dollars for late payments and $2.50 for paper bill that I requested be sent by email 4 fukn times! Grrrrr a big fuck you Telstra!
I just totally ignore the late fees. I might start totally ignoring the bills altogether. Bastards!
Look. When the choice is between Shitstra, Droptus and Vodafail I do feel like options are limited. Let’s go back to carrier pigeons and morse code I say. Have a word with Donald Trump – he wants to ask Bill Gates to turn off the internet. I shit you not. Dot dash dot dot dash etc
At least if the Internet got turned off I wouldn’t have to look at Trumps turd face anymore.
We must live in a third world country now cause 6 fucking months to get a land line connected is fucking bullshit Telstra you bunch of lying ass wipes what a fucked up phone system we have in this country these days
A BIG GET FUCKED TELSTRA YOU FUCKING LYING DOGS