Telstra Media

Telstra Media (formerly known as BigPond) is an Australian Internet service provider and a product of Telstra. It is Australia's largest ISP and is based in Melbourne. The BigPond brand has been in the process of being discontinued in favor of full Telstra branding since 2013. As of May 2016, BigPond Movies is the only remaining service using BigPond branding.^[1]

Internet

Note that the remainder of the article has not been changed to reflect the name change from BigPond to Telstra Media.

Telstra Media offers 5 types of Internet access;

• Cable – BigPond is Australia's largest provider of Cable Internet access, which covers parts of Australia's main cities (Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, and the Gold Coast). Speeds available are 'Turbo' (8 Mbit/s downstream, 128 kbit/s upstream), 'Elite' (30 Mbit/s down, 1 Mbit/s up) and 'Ultimate' (100 Mbit/s down, 2 Mbit/s up).
• ADSL – BigPond provides both ADSL and ADSL2+ services where available, with speeds ranging from 256 kbit/s down/64 kbit/s up to 20 Mbit/s down/1 Mbit/s up. The current speeds available on ADSL plans that BigPond offers are "up to" 1.5 Mbit/s down/256 kbit/s up, "up to" 8 Mbit/s down/384 kbit/s up and "up to" 20 Mbit/s down/1 Mbit/s up.

Naked DSL – A six-week trial of two kinds of naked DSL to "assess customer demand" was launched on 1 June 2010. 'Pure DSL' having the ability to receive incoming calls and make emergency calls, and 'Naked DSL' being offered without a dial tone.^[2]

• Mobile Broadband – Through Telstra's Next G network, BigPond provides the largest wireless network coverage in Australia, reaching 99% of the population.^[3] Download speeds on the 3G network range from 256 kbit/s to 3.5 Mbit/s in regional and interurban areas, and "up to" 21 Mbit/s in metropolitan and city areas. Download speeds on the 4G Network are "up to" 40Mbit/s. BigPond also provides wireless 'hot spots'.^[4]
• Satellite – Bigpond provides Satellite internet mainly for regional customers who are too far away from the exchange to get ADSL, and cannot get Cable. Satellite is delivered via 2 way Satellite with speeds ranging from 256 kbit/s down/64 kbit/s up to 800 kbit/s down/128 kbit/s up.^[5]
• Dialup – BigPond has moved customers off dialup to a broadband platform, and in 2006 its broadband customers surpassed the number of dialup customers.

Customer Service

In 2007 a survey of 14,000 people by PC Authority magazine found BigPond users rated poorly for customer service, and less than a third considered their service value for money. However, BigPond argued that the survey's structure had encouraged people to provide extreme opinions.^[6]

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) reported 14,692 complaints against Telstra BigPond for the period 1 January 2009 – 31 March 2009.^[7] This reflected 47.5% of all complaints against all internet service providers reported to the TIO in Australia in that period. Customer Service, Complaints Handling, Faults & Provision accounted for 8,103 complaints in that period.

BigPond uses offshore call centres to provide most of their technical support. The Technical Support 133933 number connects through a VoIP line to support staff based in The Philippines, by call centre outsource companies, TeleTech & Teleperformance.^[8] Technical Support officers have limited ability to resolve issues and cannot refer any issue to a Complaint Handling Officer or Customer Advocate. If the support call relates to network issues the Technical Support team cannot take any action to resolve the problem.

In November 2009 Telstra chief executive David Thodey promised a "new Telstra" which will be much more responsive to its customers in a bid to improve the telco's corporate reputation, stating that the new mantra at Telstra would be "customer service, customer service, customer service", and announcing increases in speed and data allowances for BigPond customers.^[9]

Services

BigPond Music

BigPond operated a music download store, offering 15 million tracks encoded at either 256kbit/s or 320kbit/s in MP3 format.

In April 2012, MOG announced a partnership with Telstra to bring MOG to Australia, the first region outside of the US to have access.^[10] Telstra and MOG launched under the BigPond Music branding on 21 June 2012.^[11] The BigPond Music service ended in late 2014.

BigPond Games and GameArena

GameArena was a website dedicated to video gaming operating under the BigPond brand that was managed by Mammoth Media and based on the east coast of Australia. The site provided news, downloads and servers primarily for the PC, and Mac, though it later branched out to include console sites. GameArena provided an online game shop GameNow, which sported various benefits to Telstra customers.^[12]

Usage of the GameArena file library, gaming servers and booking service were freely available to anyone, but provided specific advantages to Telstra customers such as preference in downloads and unmetered usage, as well as various bonuses in competitions. In 2005, GameArena went through a new shift with the merging of GameNow and Gameshop into itself. The name became simply BigPond GameArena.^[13]

GameArena once operated over 100 gaming servers, which were monitored by a volunteer force of administrators, known as GameOps. GameCreate was a service offered free of charge where users may book a server for a specific game for a 2-hour period of time. This server was private and could be used for either ladder training or social events.^[14]

GameArena servers and its website closed on 20 October 2014.^[15]

The Pond in Second Life

Telstra BigPond owned and operated a number of virtual islands in the online game Second Life^[16] for approximately three years. BigPond closed its Second Life presence in December 2009.^[17]

See also

• Internet television in Australia
• Subscription television in Australia

References

External links

• Official website