Australia's BigPond loses its heartbeat

[dalybrian]

One of the difficulties with being the first mover in tech business is that the followers may not endorse all of your technology choices. The Australian cableco Telstra has a broadband business called BigPond. Until recently, BigPond used to use an authentication scheme called "heartbeat," which required either special software on users' PCs or a router that had BigPond-specific software built in. Neither scheme was especially reliable (and they certainly weren't standard). Telstra's rolling out a new billing system, and they're taking advantage of the upgrade to kill off heartbeat authentication, which was apparently a cause of much customer complaint and support issues.

For more information about BigPond's heartbeat:
- read this article on Whirlpool.

Link: http://lists.fiercemarkets.com/c.htm...,gmk2,fa0,cfsd

[juiceheadband]

alright, i'll read it.tnx.

[leoandru]

Hrm interesting.. I'v seen Bigpond support in many routers as well as many unix OS. Though not standard I would say the protocol is well know and somewhat of a standard. Its interesting to learn the problems it faced though. Thanks.

[dalybrian]

Well i know they are famous in the D-Link product line. I heard about Unix but never saw it for myself.