BrasilTelecom is the most popular (and hated) phone company in South Brazil, with a very large market share, thanks to the fact it was a state-owned company that was sold for a dime (that’s another story).

Since it was announced that Brazilian authorities were tending to ask for the backbones controllers to block access to a specific YouTube video (more details here: Where no China has gone before: Brazil bans YouTube), BrT customers are totally unable to access any YouTube contents.

That’s not, however, any preventive measure in order to preserve any customer from being sued; it’s just an opportunist movement to cover the real problems they have when they sign up a contract with BrT.

A customer of mine (I sell web hosting at PortoFácil, in case you didn’t know), who has a BrT link of 600kbps, called me to see why his site was taking so long to load. You know, a customer is a customer, but they are not supposed to have a technical profile. “My site” (sic) in fact was not the site I host for him, but his start page, that is one of those home-made portals bloated with — useful or not — information.

Since I was there, I took some time to compare how my own sites perform in ordinary equipment (not the developer’s machine), and noticed that the download speed was really too slow. I then called the phone support from BrT and they told me to download a file from BrT network. The download was fine and fast (66Kb/s). Once our problem was not solved, we asked for a paid visit from a technician, hoping that he could point out to a feasible solution.

On the selected time the technician was at my customer’s office, but when I explained the problem he took his brief and said that was not a cabling problem. Under the right psychological pressure the guy told us the following: BrT links to outside Brazil are very highly utilized, but the company has no plans to solve this problem. Of course, the final user, the customer, is penalized, because the contract says the company guarantees only 10% of the nominal bandwidth, and only inside their own network!

Now, BrT is taking advantage of the hype on the case of the model having sex fun on the beach to lower their backbone utilization by blocking one of the main bandwidth-consumer sites.

Finally, what makes me the saddest about this story is the following: I’m about to move to another apartment, bigger, better, more beautiful. But in that part of the town there is no bandwidth provider but BrasilTelecom. Bummer!

[BP]Modems ADSL, Telefones, Internet, Computadores, Advogados[/BP]

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