MUNDOOLUN man Raj Aggarwal feels ripped off when he receives his bills from Telstra.
He is charged $90 monthly for 500GB but he says slow internet speeds mean he is lucky to use 2GB.
Mr Aggarwal said he was infuriated by Telstra, who had told him the service would improve.
“Telstra assured me that once the exchange was upgraded everyone in Mundoolun Estate would get a better service,” he said.
“For years we paid full price for half the service and then came the NBN (and) the whole internet issue went to a different level.”
Mr Aggarwal told the Jimboomba Times of his problems with Telstra after Mundoolun Estate residents staged a protest earlier this month calling for more to be done to fix their slow internet speeds.
Protest spokesperson Di McMath, who has lived at the estate for seven years, said the internet service in the area had never been good.
“We have consistently had intermittent problems with our internet,” she said.
“The majority of the time our speed tests are less than 1mbps. I have never had a speed test reach over 1.3mpbs. It’s not good enough.”
Mr Aggarwal, who has lived at Mundoolun for the past nine years, said his internet connection had worsened since slowing three years ago, with the service freezing for days in July.
He said Telstra’s poor complaint handling process further exacerbated his problems.
Mr Aggarwal said he had called Telstra 15 times in the past two months to get his internet issues fixed.
At one stage he waited about a week for Telstra to send him a replacement modem. The equipment never arrived, prompting him to buy the modem himself.
While he was assured by Telstra a new modem would enable him to reconnect, Mr Aggarwal said the advice proved useless.
“The internet was not any better,” he said.
“I called Telstra back and then they told me the NBN was not working properly because half of their customers were on the old system and the other half on NBN.”
“They said, ‘until all come across to NBN, this problem will continue.’”
While he was given a 3GB dongle – a connection device – by Telstra for interim data use, the data was used up within days.
“(Their) service is very poor and it takes hours and days to explain that we are paying for the service we are not getting,” he said.
“I am paying for internet I can’t use. Telstra just do not care.”
While Mr Aggarwal acknowledged he could sign-up with a different service provider, he said Telstra offered mobile coverage needed for his job.
“But mobile service is as bad, as it drops out time to time,” he said.
When Telstra was asked why Mr Aggarwal continued to be charged for 500GB a month despite access problems, a spokesperson said they would work with Mr Aggarwal to investigate internet speed issues.
“We have adjusted his plan to improve his experience and provide better value,” the spokesperson said.
“Like any network, speeds on the NBN vary due to quite a large number of factors. We have set these out for our customers in an online guide. Some of these factors are managed by retail service providers like Telstra. Others are designed and controlled by NBN co.”
“(Mr Aggarwal is) a completely different situation to ... those other residents who are currently still on ADSL.”
Mr Aggarwal later said the improved experience and better value provided by Telstra was delivered in the form of a 25GB dongle.
