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Telstra sucks. Don’t get me wrong. I’m on Telstra (I was on 3, but I churned to Telstra because they had the HTC Desire, which I had desired for some time already). I spent the last long weekend in the cold¹ collecting data, and here’s why.

So my girlfriend got on Telstra too, seeing that I had just switched to Telstra, and Telstra-to-Telstra phone calls are cheaper. She had wanted a Blackberry for quite sometime now, her previous phone being a Nokia E71. So, the decision was to get on Telstra’s Blackberry plan – the $49 cap to be exact. Now, she’s not a stupid girl (I mean, how could she be, she’s my girlfriend), and she knows a fair bit about Blackberries. So 2 Mondays ago, she went to get her phone – the Blackberry Bold 9700.

When she came back, she found none of her apps were working. Why? Because she had no BBpin. And after 2 days of troubleshooting, she discovered that Telstra sold BB data plans separately from a cap plan –  a fact that she wasn’t told before hand.  So she went back to the Telstra shop that sold her the phone plan. She clearly wasn’t informed about that, and guess what, neither were the people in the shop. The people from the shop didn’t know that in order to run Blackberry apps, you need a connection to the Blackberry servers. And to connect to the Blackberry servers, you need a Blackberry data plan.

2 days into your new contract, and you discover that on your own accord, spending countless hours worrying and fretting and troubleshooting the phone, my girlfriend was understandably quite upset about it. So, the Telstra shop people offered to put her on a Blackberry data plan and then immediately cancel the plan once she has downloaded all the apps and activated it. Hereupon, a second mistake was made. You needed a constant connection thru the BB data plan to get your apps working. It doesn’t just activate once and works. Neither the shop people nor my girlfriend knew it at that time.

Needless to say, by the end of the night, her apps were not working again. Naturally, everyone was upset. So, the very next day I went to the store with her, and tried to get things working. Here’s basically the summary of what happened in conversation (the Too Long; Didn’t Read edition is here):
Continue reading Telstra Sucks

1. no, it’s not that cold [↩]