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Internet Down, and OUT, for Thousands of Aussies

An extended Internet outage affecting some 30,000 Australians appears to have been caused by a corporate power struggle at a major ISP Wholesaler in Brisbane.

Around midday on Wednesday September 20th 2006, 80 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were left with no service to provide to their 30,000 dialup and ADSL/Broadband customers across Australia.

The national wholesaler has provided no explanation at all for the disruption which looks unlikely to be resolved. At time of writing (Monday 25th) some services had been restored but now seem to be offline again. Most states still remain without Internet access.

Update Thursday 29th September

With no restoration of services, and advice from the CEO of Veridas to move customers to another provider, it can only be assumed that Veridas will shortly be in the hands of receivers.

The proprietor of one ISP severely affected by the outage, Stephen Spry from Come On Aussie Internet Services, said he was unable to deal with the volume of calls on the issue in the first few days of the crisis.

A message was left on answering machines stating the cause of the outage was unknown, and that no restoration time was known.

Mr Spry said, "Some ISPs are now attempting to move customers to other wholesalers. But since ADSL connections can take up to a week to move, it will be some time before people get back online."

"These corporate shenanigans will mean the end for a lot of the smaller ISPs, including Come On Aussie Internet Services" Mr Spry said.

"We plan on assisting our current customers to move to new ISP's, but once this debacle is over, we will be out of the game for good."

Mr Spry said he will endeavour to ring customers to explain their options, but as current customer records are only on the Veridas system, this may prove difficult.

Come On Aussie ADSL and dialup customers who have not been able to get in touch with Stephen are urged to phone 02 6559 8579. Leave your details if you get the machine so calls can be returned.

If you can get on to the internet, visit www.comeonaussie.net.au for more information on what has been happening, and what you can do.

Author Credits:

Stephen Spry is proprietor of Come On Aussie Internet Services, one of the Australian ISPs affected by this outage.

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