BigPond
| Product of Telstra | |
| Industry | Telecommunications / Media |
| Founded | 1996 as Telstra Corporation |
| Headquarters | Sydney, NSW, Australia |
|
Key people
|
David Thodey Group Managing Director |
| Services |
Internet service provider News Online Television |
|
Number of employees
|
10,500 (2007) |
| Parent | Telstra |
| Website | bigpond.com |
BigPond is an Australian Internet service provider and a product of Telstra. BigPond 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. To date, BigPond Movies is the only remaining service using BigPond branding.
BigPond offers 5 types of Internet access;
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.
The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) reported 14,692 complaints against Telstra BigPond for the period 1 January 2009 – 31 March 2009. 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. 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.
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. Telstra and MOG launched under the BigPond Music branding on 21 June 2012. The BigPond Music service ended in late 2014.
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.
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