Just how incompetent can the major telcos get? We can understand that a small ISP might have misconfigured servers, or might have a sales staff that is too busy and overworked to respond the next day, but having live in Hong Kong and having suffered through some of their madness, I have to say, I’m disappointed by them.
There are three issues we’d like to highlight.
- Scammy sales techniques
- Poor sales service
- Badly configured servers
It is well known that PCCW employs third parties who act as agents and use scammy techniques to upsell their services. Here are a couple of threads on GeoExpat that explain how they do this - PCCW Now TV Scam and PCCW - Tricky Tricky on GeoExpat.Com, our website for expats in Hong Kong. It should be noted that these deceptive sales tactics have been going on for a year (much longer actually… we’ve just not had users complain about them).
Their basic sales technique as gathered from these threads involves a sales person, posing as a technician who will pretend that they are upgrading their services and need to check your modem or set top box. Once the sales person has been let in, they then try and tell you that you’ll be loosing your internet service if you don’t upgrade … or something to that effect. The upgrade typically involves having to sign an 18 month contract and purchasing additional premium channels. Many folks have asked the sales person to leave but a few seem to fall for these tactics.
Our second issue is piss-poor sales service. We’ve over the last three years had several requests to their sales department, for hosting, for business internet connections (usually sold at a premium, so there is an incentive for someone to call us back) and have yet to receive any response back from their accounts team. Given that this unresponsiveness has gone on for three years, we suspect it is a major problem and not just some transitional issues which could get fixed.
Finally - a MAJOR DNS mess up.
Taken from USA Today
Pakistan Telecom established a route that directed requests for YouTube videos from local Internet subscribers to a "black hole," where the data was discarded, according to Renesys. Pakistan Telecom’s mistake was that it then published that route to its international data carrier, PCCW Ltd. of Hong Kong, Underwood said.
The second mistake was that PCCW accepted that route, Underwood said. It started directing requests from its customers for YouTube data to Pakistan. And since PCCW is one of the world’s 20 largest data carriers, its routing table was passed along to other large carriers without any attempt at verification.
"Once a pretty big network gets an error like that, it propagates to most or all of the Internet very quickly," Underwood said. As he put it, Pakistan Telecom was impersonating YouTube to much of the world.
Pakistan Telecom and the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority were unavailable for comment on Monday night local time. Rex Stover, vice president of sales for PCCW Global in Herndon, Va., said the company is still trying to figure out what happened and why.
This is very serious. While we have some sympathy for the folks in Pakistan who were robbed of their right to watch cats playing pianos on YouTube, the fact that PCCW accepted a DNS change from the Pakistani Telco is a very serious problem.
If the telco’s DNS servers had been broken into, they could have been used to redirect virtually any traffic to a phishing site, which could have been used to easily take over millions of bank, email and corporate accounts.
In a real world scenario, imagine if the phishers were sophisticated enough where they set up a paypal clone and sent a bad IP address to PCCW through the Pakistani Telco’s server - now anyone who tried to access Paypal through an ISP that relied on PCCW for their upstream connectivity and DNS services would direct users to that IP address.
Lets wait and watch how this unfolds.
Tags: pccw
