Bennetts Road Norman Park,
originally uploaded by troykelly.

It’s amazing, just how quickly the water is coming up. I took this about 20 minutes ago just near our place at Bennetts Road.

You can’t charge your customers for something that they can’t manage. It’s pretty simple. Do you think a service station could get away with not putting meters at the pumps?

Data Usage Monday

Yesterday afternoon my 3G USB stick suddenly slowed down. This isn’t abnormal on the Gold Coast where it would appear that Telstra‘s contention ratio is pretty poor – but because it sad to neatly at 24k up and down I thought I might have gone over my data usage limit.

I had just upgraded plans the week before – same dollar cost – double the data, and since the upgrade had only really been doing actual work on my stick – SSH sessions mostly working on our VoIP servers.

When we upgraded plans, the operator performing the upgrade said that the online usage meter would not reflect the changes correctly because we were updating mid plan, but gave no indication that the SMS or Email data usage alerts would not work. Obviously – I would be relying on those alerts – given I couldn’t rely on the online meter.

When I logged in and saw that I had allegedly used over $18,500 worth of data – I was a little shocked.

I immediately called Telstra to find out what the issue was. It was pretty apparent from the usage meter page  that the product had just not been applied. But what concerned me was the volume of data in excess of what we had purchased.

After two attempts at talking to Telstra staff, the first call either dropping out or being hung up on, and the second call the operator not wanting to deal with it – I resigned myself to waiting until today.

I called again this morning, disappointingly to find that Telstra’s 125111 number was not working properly. The IVR was offline and just routing calls to BigPond Customer Support (why – I have no idea). After speaking with no less then four customer service agents I ended up talking with Luke.

Data Billing - Tuesday

While explaining all the issues, I logged back in to Telstra.com and tried to check my usage, and was presented with their typical error page.

I kept tinkering around refreshing, logging out and in etc while Luke was investigating – then eventually I was presented with today’s version of my usage.

Obviously vastly different to yesterday, and bearing to resemblance to the prior figures in any way shape or form.

I was told that there was nothing that could be done until a bill was issued, and then we would have to raise a complaint. Luke is going to remind himself to follow up after the 22nd and get back to me.

I am however left with no 3G stick to use for connectivity now, because I really just can not trust the Telstra usage meter or alerts system. I checked again yesterday with the Telstra software – and there were no SMS’s or email’s about my usage and the online meter is obviously useless.

If we are paying for a service, that can potentially cost a fortune when used to excess – how are we meant to manage that with no tools at all?

[UPDATE Wednesday 5 January 2011]

Even more usage, with the modem turned off?

This morning I decided to check my data usage again – and even though I have had the device turned off, unplugged and in my bag since noticing the issue – I have some how used even more data.

If you have a Telstra 3G device – and you are getting charged data overages – refuse to pay. Their system is obviously faulty and can not be trusted.

Telstra T-Touch Tab by Huawei

What’s meant to be an alternative to the amazingly popular Apple iPad can only be described as a horrific embarrassment to both Telstra and Huawei.

The overly heavy, under resourced device has had operating system customisations made by both manufacturer Huawei and reseller Telstra that render it essentially unusable.

For a device that is designed to go anywhere with you, switching from WiFi connectivity to 3G network data should be seamless and should almost certainly not cause an interruption to applications on the device. In their seemingly infinite wisdom Huawei have decided to raise a modal alert box whenever you are leaving WiFi data warning you that if you were to continue – you would be using network data.

I don’t particularly have a problem with this – if I could acknowledge it forever, or turn it off in the settings. I can only assume because they think that users of this tablet will be so thick headed to not understand what they are doing – there is no way to stop this warning from coming up. Further aggravating the issue, when the warning is raised – everything on the device stops working. Nothing happens until you click “Ok”. Check out the videos at the end to see the amazing user protection in action.

Putting aside all the application and base level system service crashes, by far the biggest usability bug is the lack of dictionary on the Telstra version of the S7. Here in Australia users of the T-Touch Tab better not have any contacts on their device – typing any type of email, sms, document or anything else that involves stringing more then one word together is nearly impossible with the non-existant keyboard dictionary on the device.

For some reason, at compile time Huawei’s brilliant minds did not include the dictionary. So, as you type – the only words the keyboard can suggest come from other areas of the device user database – including your contacts. Typing something simple like “Can you come and pick me up?” turns in to a jumble of words and names – based on what you have in your contacts listing. Check out the second video below to see just how unusable the device is.

The Android platform opens up oppertunities for manafacturers to acknowledge and resolve serious bugs like this quickly, and easily. Sadly in the case of the Telstra T-Touch Tab – both Telstra and Huawei in extensive conversations acknowledge that it is a serious issue but have stated that they plan to do nothing to resolve it.

Don’t get caught with an unusable and expensive Android tablet.

Telstra T Touch Tab Issues 2 from Purple Oranges Pty Ltd on Vimeo.

Huawei S7 Android Telstra T Touch Tab Issue 1 from Purple Oranges Pty Ltd on Vimeo.