Telstra, a major Australian telecommunications company, has been sued by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) for allegedly downgrading the broadband upload speed for customers. The said incident took place between October and November 2020. The issue was that the company didn’t inform them about the downgrade in speed to the customers, and neither lowered the charges. According to Reuters, ACCC has taken Telstra to the Federal Court because of this. As per the report, over 9000 residential customers were affected by the said incident. The customers who were allegedly affected by the issue were the ones who took the company’s cheaper broadband offering between May 2017 and October 2020. Telstra offered 2500 impacted customers A$90 credit after the error was acknowledged in early 2021. However, more than 6300 customers are yet to be informed of the same. Now ACCC is trying to get compensation to the customers who were impacted and not informed later. Telstra has a presence spanning over 20 countries. The company says that in Australia, it offers retail mobile services to over 18.8 million customers, fixed standalone voice services to 960,000 subscribers, and 3.8 million retail fixed bundles. Note that the subscriber data has been pulled from Telstra’s website and might not be the latest.
