Is one Telstra Free Data Day enough to compensate their woes?

On Thursday the 17th March Telstra experienced an outage that took 8,000,000 customers off their mobile network for more than an hour and took a fair while after that to fully restore.  They then had a series of other smaller outages and speed issues in the days following – yet only a single day of Free Data is being offered – is that enough?

I hate to be the guy bashing Telstra while they are down, but let me be clear, I feel for the team behind the scenes trying to fix the issues, and I feel for the front facing staff having to deal with customers.  I’m just questioning if they’re doing enough to smooth things over with customers.

On Friday Morning of March 18th at 6.30am, less than 12 hours after resolving that issue, Telstra CEO Andy Penn faced the media and apologies, plus announced another Free Data Day for April 3rd.

This “compensation” followed a mass outage of their network in February, which was immediately compensated on the 14th of February with a Free Data day.

There’s two big differences this time round.

Firstly, this Free Data Day is several weeks after the event – we’re going to assume that’s a wise move to ensure the network is actually up to the task of taking the network traffic.  We know from Sunday the 14th it was a record day of data on the network.

Secondly, there were several other outages – granted smaller, but still outages on their network in the days after the 17th of March.  So in my mind, the compensation hasn’t changed for customers since the original outage, despite the additional woes in the days following.

But in reality – what is it Telstra customers would want?

Should the Free Data day be on a weekday – is Telstra wisely using a low traffic day to offer up the free data?

Or is it more a case of we don’t really know what would serve as adequate compensation?  There’s no way a “free month” would pass muster at any level, so don’t even think about that.

So in reality – if you’re not happy – what would you propose?

It’s not as if other companies are throwing around much compo for issues?

Perhaps it’s best to take Telstra’s offer of Free Data on Sunday April 3 with open arms, begin the streaming, begin the downloading.

Oh, and for those of you in Daylight Savings states, don’t forget to put your clock back at 3am – that gives you an EXTRA hour of Free Data:)