Opening a can of worms

Telemarketers are a pet hate of mine. I’ve made my point about them before, so I won’t repeat it.

Tonight we had a different class of telemarketing. That is… a company that you do have dealings with, contacting you to advertise another service. In this instance, it was Telstra offering us a discounted internet service. We currently have our telephone services (a landline and two mobiles) with them.

My disagreement with this sort of marketing is one of principle. We pay you to provide us a service, we do not pay you to pay telemarketers to harass us via the aforementioned service. I’ve also had SMS messages on my phone from Telstra, thankfully this is rare.

Now… they’ve unwittingly called us thinking we’re the typical non-technical household. Okay, fine, they weren’t to know that. However, one would think the telemarketers would know something about the product they’re selling. I initially answered the phone, and of course, when the woman at the other end asked for my father (who holds the account) I naturally transferred her.

A few points:

  • She did not seem to understand the limitations of what was being sold… yes, Cable internet is theoretically faster than ADSL… especially 512/128kbps ADSL (which is what we have). But cable is a shared medium, ADSL isn’t.
  • My father immediately asked about getting a static IP address. She had no clue what this was. Tsk tsk tsk… Internetworking 101 people.

The plan offered was only discounted (half price) for 12 months, after which, the price would double, resulting in a monthly rate only marginally less than that offered by our current ISP, who we’ve had a service with since 1996 and have been quite happy with.

Should an ISP be thinking of offering their services… first and foremost, don’t contact us with your offers… if we were looking to change, we’ll contact you. However, since Telstra have come to us, I guess that gives us the right to dictate what we expect… Our expectations:

  • Static IP is a must. (At last check, Telstra only offer this on ADSL for an extra $10/month… not sure if this has changed)
  • IPv6 native is highly preferred, but a tunnel is livable (currently we have one via AARNet)
  • We must be able to run our own server with any arbitrary service we choose including but not limited to:
    • HTTP and HTTPS
    • DNS
    • SMTP (both directions)
    • IMAP/IMAPS
    • NTP
    • XMPP
    • SSH
    • OpenVPN tunnels
    • IRC
    • VoIP services (including Skype, EchoLink and Ekiga… not ruling out D-Star, IRLP or other systems in future either)
  • We must be permitted to maintain, reconfigure and replace any and all network infrastructure components within our property boundary at our discretion… This includes choice of hardware and software!
  • In the event of a problem, I expect to talk to a competent tech support person who at least understands basic networking principles such as the TCP/IP model (or the OSI model which it is frequently compared to)
  • Related to the above, when contacting tech support, I expect that any findings I report are taken on board, and that appropriate troubleshooting techniques are used. I did not go to university studying IT and EE for 6.5 years for nothing!

Some of this is due to frustrations I’ve had with ISPs, particularly Telstra when troubleshooting issues on others’ behalf, and hitting this exact problem of being treated like a dummy because the other end is only reading a script. iTel haven’t given us any issue thus far… it’d be nice if they offered native IPv6, but that’s about my only nit I have with them… they’ve provided a very reliable service and haven’t gotten in our way. Whenever there has been a problem, it has been quickly identified and rectified. Thus, we have no reason to change… finance alone is not going to cut it.

Specific to Telstra… it’d be nice if they fixed the broken DNS server that fails to resolve yi.org domains. (If you have trouble viewing my site directly, but can see my post on Planet Gentoo… try changing your DNS server settings over to an alternate one such as OpenDNS, then please contact your ISP about it.)

The telemarketer tonight had to end the call prematurely while she found out from her employer whether static IP addresses were possible with the plan they were about to try and sell us. She’s apparently going to call back tomorrow evening. All I can say is watch out for low-flying aircraft.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Public Syndication, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Opening a can of worms”

  1. James Le Cuirot Says:
    June 15th, 2009 at 9:34 pm

    I’ve always wondered why I could never get to your site! I’ve added it to my hosts file for the moment. My ISP varies wildly. Some people claim it’s slow and unreliable. Others, like myself, claim the opposite. It does have monkeys on the phone but at the same time, they are one of the official Gentoo mirrors! Figure that one out. Before I try, perhaps in vain, to get them to fix this, what is the problem exactly?

  2. Michael Wheeler Says:
    June 15th, 2009 at 9:57 pm

    I agree with that completely.

    Also I seem to have an IPv6 related issue viewing your site which I have had for awhile. Seems AARNET is getting lost…. AARNET IPv6 broke too often for me to bother. I’m currently using he6. How long till you finish this term of uni and come back to ##australia?

    1 2001:470:f0a6::1 1.002 ms 0.71 ms 0.604 ms
    2 TheSkorm-1.tunnel.tserv15.lax1.ipv6.he.net 196.416 ms 197.242 ms 195.331 ms
    3 gige-g4-6.core1.lax1.he.net 195.737 ms 200.409 ms 199.509 ms
    4 10gigabitethernet1-3.core1.pao1.he.net 201.761 ms 474.277 ms 215.321 ms
    5 gigabitethernet0-6.bb1.a.pao.aarnet.net.au 206.117 ms 205.934 ms 359.633 ms
    6 so-3-1-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 363.171 ms 361.508 ms 359.716 ms
    7 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 359.637 ms 363.046 ms 366.135 ms
    8 * * *
    9 * * broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 362.074 ms
    10 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 359.726 ms 583.19 ms 360.9 ms
    11 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 360.686 ms 360.856 ms 364.582 ms
    12 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 358.686 ms 364.056 ms 362.449 ms
    13 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 364.275 ms 359.303 ms 361.009 ms
    14 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 360.698 ms 364.116 ms 364.609 ms
    15 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 361.881 ms 366.22 ms 361.691 ms
    16 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 360.694 ms 363.97 ms 360.395 ms
    17 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 360.774 ms 364.111 ms 360.713 ms
    18 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 366.495 ms 365.776 ms 423.466 ms
    19 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 363.945 ms 364.167 ms 365.404 ms
    20 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 365.094 ms 364.553 ms 364.95 ms
    21 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 364.961 ms 364.737 ms 361.182 ms
    22 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 364.163 ms 364.472 ms 360.876 ms
    23 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 363.882 ms 361.251 ms 364.149 ms
    24 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 364.166 ms 370.579 ms 365.186 ms
    25 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 364.858 ms 364.88 ms 365.881 ms
    26 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 364.404 ms 364.868 ms 362.978 ms
    27 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 361.701 ms 374.88 ms 368.75 ms
    28 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 361.884 ms 365.194 ms 363.69 ms
    29 broker1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 365.077 ms 364.741 ms 364.896 ms
    30 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 365.069 ms 364.578 ms 596.393 ms

  3. Michael Wheeler Says:
    June 15th, 2009 at 10:01 pm

    James Le Cuirot, by memory, Telstra DNS servers break with IPv6 records.

  4. patrick Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 3:10 am

    Please do not ever suggest using such broken messed-up nameservers as OpenDNS. They provide something almost, but not completely unlike the DNS you’d usually expect. There are public nameservers like the well-known 4.2.2.1 that do not try to sneak in advertising or misdirect you randomly!

  5. Redhatter (VK4MSL) Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 6:57 am

    Well… not sure on the yi.org domain… any yi.org site, not just mine, will fail to resolve on some Telstra Bigpond and 3 network clients. I’ve never figured out why… even the yi.org main site fails to resolve. So it’s not an IPv6-specific issue. The nameservers for that domain are:

    ; < <>> DiG 9.4.2 < <>> ns yi.org
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 16001
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;yi.org.                                IN      NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
yi.org.                 133785  IN      NS      connubialis.crackerjack.net.
yi.org.                 133785  IN      NS      fumo-viridus.crackerjack.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
connubialis.crackerjack.net. 159318 IN  A       67.228.190.60
fumo-viridus.crackerjack.net. 159318 IN A       72.55.145.119

    I suggested OpenDNS as a workaround since it's an easy option, there are guides there on how to set it up for the technically challenged, and it saves me having to remember an IP address. I could alternatively run my own public nameserver, not sure what security considerations need to be made though. I realise it's not the best... and that it likes to give false answers instead of NXDOMAIN:

    stuartl@zhouman:~$ host this.domain.does.not.exist 208.67.222.222
Using domain server:
Name: 208.67.222.222
Address: 208.67.222.222#53
Aliases:

this.domain.does.not.exist has address 208.67.219.132
Host this.domain.does.not.exist not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

    versus

    stuartl@zhouman:~$ host this.domain.does.not.exist
Host this.domain.does.not.exist not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

    Which they could fix, making them less evil… but anyway. They at least resolve the yi.org domains.

    As for the IPv6 tunnel here… seems it has been up and down like a yoyo. They (AARNet) reset their systems at 3:00AM… I have a cron job that detects if the tunnel has gone down, and tries to re-establish it. Annoying, but it works most of the time… and I see it as being only a temporary measure before we get native IPv6 (hint hint iTel).

  6. Redhatter (VK4MSL) Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 9:07 am

    Ohh… and speaking of unsolicited marketing… Mr 67.228.229.124, welcome to the blacklist… I couldn’t give a damn about your pet health sites.

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