Telstra rejected a customer's application for iiNet ADSL, citing poor line quality, but later connected him to Bigpond ADSL.

The telco giant today denied it had given Bigpond an unfair advantage on the line quality check. Telstra's Kerrina Lawrence blamed the chain of events on human error and said "the staff member is aware of the seriousness of the error."

But the customer, Steve Mann, said Telstra offered him a generous settlement to drop his TIO complaint over the matter -- a complete refund of his setup costs, and a 3GB plan for six months at the 1GB plan price.

According to Mann, a Telstra representative told him the original iiNet line test had been done at a time when rain or humidity had affected the line quality, and when Bigpond did its line quality test, the line quality had improved.

"I figured they would stick to this explanation like glue", said Mann, "so I took the settlement."

But when he told iiNet he was no longer interested in the connection, iiNet responded with surprise. Telstra had informed them that the line quality test had been 'erroneously passed' and iiNet could not service that customer because the line was of an unacceptable quality.

Telstra's Kerrina Lawrence said both Telstra Wholesale and Bigpond used the same computerised service quality check, which made it impossible for the carrier to favour one set of customers over another.

"Telstra has processes in place so that there is no disparity of treatment between BigPond end users and end users of [Telstra Wholesale] ISPs," she said.

"Telstra has confirmed that a staff member recently entered the wrong data and inadvertently continued an ADSL order despite it being disqualified for excessive transmission loss. The customer's premise is situated in excess of 5KM route distance from the exchange. Customers generally need to be about 3.5 kilometres from their exchange to qualify for ADSL."