ISP protester's problem solved by police called to remove him from store | Hacker News Reader

ISP protester's problem solved by police called to remove him from store

smh.com.au

64 pointstankenmate27 comments

A case of a successful police negotiation with Telstraists? :)

NB for international readers - Telstra is our local Australian national carrier and the telco at the centre of the story.

Maybe I should call in the police to negotiate my case with them too - my office line redirection has been down for weeks, and no support agent can solve it while on the phone. They have 3x now given me a callback text with a web link to resume the call that never works. First thing in 2008 I am cancelling my Telstra phone service!

> First thing in 2008

Hello time traveller. While you're at it, buy/mine Bitcoin. It seems crazy, don't worry - it doesn't get any less so. Sell it Mid December 2017.

Also, if you're not getting anywhere and it's a business line service - find out who your account rep is, and call them up to fix this kind of rubbish.

Otherwise, yeah, go sit in a Telstra store until the cops turn up to fix the issue.

:D I can see now that my failing this year will be typing '2008' rather than the more common mistake of '2017' for the next few months!

Actually, we do have a Telstra business rep, and I have spoken to her twice now with no result either. Very disappointing.

But on to a more positive note - Another HN user who actually works for Telstra saw my post above and reached out to me via email to try and reach a resolution. I really appreciate that he did this on (a) a public holiday and (b) took some effort to find me email address to reach out to me on.

Fingers crossed that he can sort things out where others have not been able to.

>Another HN user who actually works for Telstra saw my post above and reached out to me via email to try and reach a resolution

Good to hear.

Checking your profile seems you're rural - The old Telstra Countrywide unit used to have a lot of influence over the organisation, to the point where they basically ran their own show and told the rest of the organisation to GTFO on most of the corp processes.

Ended up with some interesting showdowns, but usually meant a better outcome for TCW customers (sometimes at the expense of Retail customers where there were boundary conflicts)

> I have spoken to her twice now with no result either.

If you don't get a good response, Escalate it - find out who their manager is and call that person.

One of the advantages for having a business service is that there's a defined SLA with penalties. It used to be 4 hour response, 8 hour restore minimum for all business services.

If it's been down this long you should be getting a decent rebate.

I thought about asking for a rebate, but honestly, I've been so disenchanted and discouraged by their lack of service that I just want my office number redirected to my mobile, and my VoIP and NBN Internet service with them terminated immediately. I can't terminate my mobile services yet as they are on plan until the end of 2018 and the penalties are too high.

I'll see what our helpful HN Telstra user can do for me, then I might consider applying for a rebate for the weeks upon weeks now that my customers have been getting a 'this number is not connected' message when they try to ring my business, resulting in many clients assuming I am not operating anymore.

Google "TIO Complaint", then instead of clicking the link to make an actual TIO Complaint, click the Google ad from Telstra asking for "one last chance".

Best I can figure it goes direct to the same complaints team as the TIO complaints, just a little faster.

Are Australian police trained and measured on their ability to resolve civil disputes on the spot?

They're trained to keep the peace. 'Measured', I don't know about.

I can imagine they're personally motivated to try and resolve things without resorting to arresting someone as that would result in paperwork/processing/etc back in the office.

It's not too uncommon to see police get involved in negotiating disputes where there's no specific powers they can exercise (other than removing/arresting the person for trespassing/breaching the peace/failure to obey a 'move on' order).

Have the cops turn up makes both sides treat things a bit more seriously - the store manager wants them gone ASAP to stop making a scene, and will be more likely to do whatever it takes to escalate the issue to someone more senior if the police ask.

Imagine if American police could be trained to use negotiation tactics, and de-escalation methods.

They are.

Remember: If it's in the news it's rare. This means that Police violence in America is rare, and Police negotiating with an ISP is rare.

How is 1188 rare? 100 people a month is absurdly common.

http://killedbypolice.net/

Can't really make that argument without considering the population of a country, right?

Wikipedia has the numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country#...

Per capita, at least 5 times more people die in the US from police firearms compared to similar countries. Compared to Australia, its about 80x (per capita).

Out of a country with a population of 320+ million, with 750,000+ "sworn officers" (able to make arrests) [0], 1188 is not "absurdly common", especially as that count is an overestimate of the objectionable cases (by how much is difficult to determine).

The issue with police shooting deaths is not that there is a high likelihood of an individual dieing tomorrow (for reference, drunk driving deaths are 10x police shooting deaths [1]), but the injustice of innocent people being killed.

Accurately representing the problem, and avoiding the "all police are terrible" comments is vital to actually trying to fix this, as a solution necessitates actively working with police, the vast majority of which have not, and will never, shoot anyone.

[0]: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/nsleed.pdf

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...

It's a small number of deaths per capita, but quite large per police interaction. So it's possible that the knock-on effects are worse than the injustice. The police would be much less useful if no one ever called them, and why would I call them if there's a significant chance of them killing me or someone else?

Police shooting people is rare in US in absolute numbers, but it's higher per capita, and worse yet, it keeps going up (and the crime rate keeps going down, esp. violent crime, so that can't be the explanation).

..sort of.. I agree that is probably a civil dispute, but that doesn't help if the outcome is "violently arrest someone on camera" What they are supposed to do is act with authority, use their position to resolve situations efficiently and rapidly. They almost always end up between unions and corps during strikes for example- and these sort of "civil" disputes often escalate into violence. So, solve it before it gets there. (15 years LE, LE trainer in use of force, recently retired)

No, this was exceptional. Try having a mental health issue, call Lifeline with suicidal thoughts and see what happens. They call the police, hours later after the episode has ended the police turn up, refuse to listen to you or your loved ones and you get to stay overnight at hospiral with no medical attention whatsoever (yes, you read that right - no medical attention).

well the problem is that most problems can be helped with first level support where the personal isn't trained for deeply technical stuff, they just need to follow their checklist. most often if you are not somebody who has an easy problem your pretty much screwed. since telekoms have a very bad way of escalating stuff to their trained personal. (probably because it's not cheap).

Good for the police. I don’t live in Australia but after reading this story Telstra sounds like a terrible company. Are there no competitors?

Yes... but the Government failed to ensure Telstra didn't becoming the monopoly on infrastructure.

When the government decided to privatise Telstra, they had two choices: (a) split it up and sell the bits separately, or (b) sell it whole. Option (a) would have maximised competition but reduced the sale price, option (b) means less competition but more one-off revenue for the government. So, which one does the government choose? Option (b), of course!

At the end of the day there was only one set of local loop copper going out to each residence. So no matter how many pieces it had been broken up into, each household was still going to face a monopoly owner of the last mile infrastructure to their residence.

They could have split retail from wholesale. So the wholesale company would have owned the local loop, but consumers couldn't directly buy from them, they'd be able to choose between retail resellers. Which is basically the current NBN model anyway.

They own all the actual cable in Australia. So are essentially our only tier 1 ISP. Everyone else just needs to buy services from them.

The copper pair and HFC lines in NBN areas are transferred into the ownership of NBN Co (though the ducts that they lie in remain Telstra assets).

Telstra is the current product of a hundred years of monopolistic government owned telco.

They were forced into competition through providing wholesale access to the copper network in various formats, but they've retained ownership of the CAN.

Basically no matter who you get your landline or DSL services through, it's going over a bit of Telstra owned copper at some point.

Things are changing somewhat with the NBN rollout, but not necessarily for the better.

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