This is a story about how The Flying Fairy [that's me] uncovered and [hopefully] ended a plot by the Australian National telco, Telstra BigPond, to cheat their customers of an estimated $100 million [for the first year]. The plan was as devious as Y2K, which is understandable as a lot of the Y2K freaks are cooling their heels at BP right now waiting and planning for Y3K and saying over and over "we don't know what number comes after 2,999".

Here is a rare shot of me morphing from Clarke Kent to this modern day metrosexual digital SuperMan. Go You Good Thing!

And here is a movie of my partner [Hatshepsut] and I on the actual Col Kilgore type sting from up North, swooping down to Canberra, catching Pete "Hello Possums" Costello asleep at the wheel counting his Super in the Future Fund.

But there is a Kafkaesque slant to this as most BP customers are also shareholders so there is a certain amount of "woof & poof" which robs Peter to pay Paul. A tiny bit of history might help. Telstra [formerly Telecom] has been National telco since the year dot and in recent times also uses the name BigPond [to confuse people and generally blame each other when things like this go South]. But I will refer to the conglomerate as BP for convenience.

There has been an issue for some years regarding the gradual privatisation of BP because our PM said "errrr, you can't be half pregnant". Finally it has all been sold [or will be] and proceeds from the sale have been put in a Future Fund to ensure Peter Costello gets his [unfunded] Super in 20 years time, so there is a green light at BP from the government to "do whatever you can think up to fleece the customers, because they don't really care".

The Crime Scene

The crime scene is in the new field of "mobile Broadband", on hourly or "timed" plans. I am not saying they don't also rort on Mb or "volume" plans [I expect they would], but simply that I have no experience of such plans.

My initial experience was in early 2005 when I was one of the first to use the Telstra "Sierra Card EVDO 1xRTT" system on a 10 hour plan for $29.95 per month. Initially the brochure said "The cost is based on time connected and is charged in 15 minute blocks [or part thereof]". My first bill was for $200 even though I knew I was within my 10 hours. The same overcharge was attempted every month and I spent the same 2 hours per month on the phone to go though the times one by one, whereupon Telstra would say "yes we have that one wrong as well and will give you credit, next one please".

It was the old Child Support Agency "telephone terrorist" tactic of simply wear customer down till they give up. But I am very resilient as CSA and now BP know. Finally a T TT said to me "we are amazed you read our bills, most people with the cards are "business people" and just give the bill to their pay office". I said "I realise that". So in the end they made a high level decision to stop rorting me [and I had no knowledge of anyone else using the card so do not know what happened for other people]. However during that time they changed the 15 minute intervals to 5 minutes.

The baton is passed to BP

No sooner had I stopped that rort, than they informed us that the EVDO 1xRTT was to end and Next G would take over, and I would get a free card to replace my $770 Sierra. After 2 weeks of the most excruciating torture being used as Ping Pong practice between T and BP, I decided to forget the [non existent] free deal and went for a BP "dongle" at $299 [and threw Sierra in the bin].

The Flying Fairy Timing System is born

Now the indications up front were that the rorting was going to be revisited for young & old but on a far grander scale, given that Next G was available [footprint wise] to 98% of the population. The thing that saved me with T was the Sierra card had an endless log, so in those hours on the phone to T, I simply deposed from the log. They overcame that oversight by making the Next G log ONLY THE LAST 10 TIMINGS. And of course they [both T & BP] have refused from day one to actually list timings on the bill [even though they do so for all other time based services].

So this could be described as the situation Ozzie Osborne of Black Sabbath sang about in Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, which starts off as:

You can sing along with Ozzie by clicking here
Stop Clip

You see right through distorted eyes, you know you had to learn,
The execution of your mind, you really had to turn.
The race is run, the book is read, the end begins to show.
The truth is out, the lies are old, but you don't want to know.

[CHORUS]

Nobody will ever let you know,
When you ask the reasons why.
They just tell you that you're on your own,
Fill your head all full of lies.

Here is a screenie showing the Sierra log at bottom with 2 years' worth of data, and BP log in the middle with only the last 10 sessions [and no actual durations shown]. At the top, the BP "details" does give a total overall time [since you bought it] which is useless, but only shows the Mbs for last session - it is confusing, but it would be very difficult in my submission to argue it is not INTENTIONALLY confusing, given that Sierra DID provide all data.

Makes me cringe to divide the $770 for the [short lived and slow] Sierra card by 63 hours to get $12 an hour for my equipment cost alone for this Telstra folly of EVDO 1xRTT.

So the writing was on the wall in big letters "YOU ARE ABOUT TO GET RORTED". Being a long time "power user" of Excel4, I decided to do a "custom application" and to keep to the genre, going forward, I based it upon the metrosexual freaks in the BP marketing and called it the Flying Fairy Timing System. Furthermore, as is my normal practice, I made both pink and blue "equal opportunity" versions. Here they are:

To explain "custom application", in 1990 MicroSoft described Excel as its "Flagship" [as it was] and promoted it as allowing the user to make custom applications [as I and many others did]. But by 1992 with the Y2K plan well and truly on the board for the Program Jocks Union, Gates showed that everyone has their price and agreed with the jocks to dumb down Excel, as it threatened the whole of the $300 billion Y2K farce. For starters it did not have a Y2K problem itself [as seen from the Flying Fairy] and it threatened to make jocks obsolete with their line by line code method from Jurassic times.

In fact I simply dusted off a timing module I had created in 1994 and added a few fairies ["go you good thing"].

The Flying Fairy Timing System is put to work

To explain my own usage of internet, I use ADSL when at home and the mobile broadband [in its several forms in last 9 years] has been for what MicroSoft used to call "Road Warrior" use. As it happened I was not on the road too much in early 2007 so my results only started to tell the story in February and more so in March [ie 10 March to 10 April bill]. I am writing this on 8 April 2007.

The next thing to explain is that I happened to find the WhirlPool Forum [WP] at the same time as I bought my dongle. Now WP is simply another government "firewall", funded to steer people away from getting justice. Howard is the master of the firewall, right up to the High Court if required but the main purpose is to keep people OUT of courts by blocking their path to justice [eg Privacy Commissioner, Ombudsman etc], but doing so in a "nice way" by explaining "we would love to help you but it's the fault of [insert name of any other quango]".

WP has big mobs of the BP "employed" Y2K freaks employed as moderators to put you in the sin bin if you get close to the truth, but they have to be very quick of course to zap you before one of the mushrooms sees the light and agrees with you. If that happens there can be a snowball effect where mushrooms start to challenge the mods about "dem WMDs" and things get out of hand. WP uses another method [besides zapping and sin bin] which is "sub firewalls", whose job it is to monitor any suggestions of "nasties by BP" coming from the mushrooms, and tell them to go to one of the real firewalls [eg "telco" Ombudsman] who will of course cover it all up as explained above.

Step #1 - data collection

So the first task was to make an easy to use timing module to record all the start & stop times for the dongle, and to shoot them to the other module which is the database and analysis tool.

Step #2 - data analysis

Armed with some representative data from Step #1, certain analysis tools were developed to test the operation of the BP billing system, and it did not take long before the suspected overcharging methods became obvious.

The PONG time

I have coined the words Pong Time to describe the culprit in this fraud device which is simply that the BP "rounding" is trigger happy and instead of waiting for 5 minutes to see if indeed you used 4 min 59 sec [and rounds you to 5 min] or 5 min 1 sec [and rounds you to 10 mins], it jumps in [as we shall see] at exactly 2 min. So if you connect to get your email etc and quickly disconnect after say 2 min 30 sec, BP has decided that is 10 min and NOT 5 min. Sounds like a minor sin? - well just wait to see the dollars Henry Higgins.

The Freaks have coined an expression Ping Time, which is apparently the time from when one freak pulls the trigger in a nerd type Space Invaders internet game and the retro rockets fire on the screen of the other freak, maybe on the other side of the world. So because it is an expression of how "late" the signal is, in their ignorance they call it "Latency", even though latency is to do with "hidden". So "when 2 or more freaks are gathered together" you will hear such expressions as "hey, just Ping me" and "the Latency sucks".

It is therefore a good thing that Next G has Latency that sucks, as that has the effect of keeping the freaks from totally taking over Next G for games, rather than be used as the Barnaby Joyce answer to "broadband in the bush" ["yes Virginia, we still DO need people called farmers, and they DO need the web to run their businesses"].

So I thought "Pong" was most appropriate, especially as it IS a bit on the nose. And because it is about jumping the gun, I call it Earliency, albeit I don't think freaks consider that non-freaks are allowed to make up silly words. But whenever gathered together with one or more persons I will throw in "the Pong really sucks with Next G", knowing I will get a rise.

The breakthrough

The breakthrough came when I posted this screenie at WP, and mods were asleep at the wheel

At top is the BP meter and the FFTS database at bottom. In BP [for February, which they call March] you see RAW times on right 3 hr 14 min 24 sec, and they agree fairly well with FFTS of 3:22. On left of FFTS is the 5 minute rounded total of 4.17 hours [and that gives efficiency of 80.93% as seen]. To further explain, look at first timing [ 8 March] of 3:57, which on the left is rounded to 5 min by FFTS, and the total of all those roundings is 4.17 hours. But if we go above to BP, the time according to the Blue bar ["Monthly Usage History"] is say 5.8 hours.

So I set up an iteration sequence in Excel run by a macro "Get Pong Time". I have input 5.8 hours and it has done its routine and said a Pong time of 3 min 24 sec. So for example, instead of the time 3:57 being rounded to 5 min, the BP timer jumps the gun and says because it is greater than 1 min 36 sec [5 min minus Pong] then it will be rounded to 10 min, and so on for all timings for the month. So the iteration macro keeps changing the Pong till it finds the correct one to give 5.8 hours.

More proof

I continued to ask WP if there was anything at all wrong in my analysis of the overcharge but no reply, nor were they game to zap it as that would only suggest I was correct. So I just let it hang and about a week later I had increased my usage for March, so I tried the Pong for March [BP call it April] and got 3 min 7 sec [you will notice I have now revised the FFTS and the actual computed BP time is shown - here as "8.00 BP hours"].

This suggested to me that this was no accidental or sloppy "egg timer" BP were using to give THEIR version of "5 min", but was an exact time, set now at Pong = 3 min. To explain the 7 seconds, one always hits the FFTS Start button before the dongle Connect, and ditto for the other end [but FFTS last]. So that means FFTS times err on the safe side by 5 to 10 seconds per timing.

But could that be backed up by revisiting February? I went back to February and doing the best I could with the BP Blue bar I said let's try 5.75 hours and not 5.8 and BINGO I got the same Pong = 3 min [plus spare change of 9 sec]

I then thought why not just do the same as BP and make a module where I can just "dial-a-fraud", so here it is with Step of 2 min [ie Pong = 3]

So as I added these screenies at WP the BP activity went into fever pitch meltdown. First I got an email to say I had reached 50% at 5 hours. That is strange as I never got one when the Blue bar reached 5 hours. And the Blue bar was immediately replaced with a Yellow bar, but the whole was now in Mbs, as seen.

Then, before you could say Y2K deja vu, it was back to hour, but what lovely hours. Not even the Pong = 0 hours of 5 min rounding, but NO rounding at all, ie the RAW figures or 100% efficient use of the 10 hours. Obviously, to use my favourite expression of Walters FM, it would have been intellectually dishonest [ie give the game away] if they simply dialled in 5 min [Pong = 0] so they had to bite the bullet and simply make the Blue bar the SAME as the numbers on the RHS of the bill. You little beauty!! and Go You Good Thing!!

Posts from others in WP provided screenies with the same result [RAW figures] so it was Game, Set and Match for the Flying Fairy. But the question remained, would BP be recidivist, going forward, and return to its bad old ways? To help keep an eye on things I have mirrored the analysis results from the Database Module on the Timer Module, so that there is no need to keep checking the database every time one does a timing. Here is a screenie of the updated Module.

The big Green Pie is indicating that a Timing is in progress [at 4 min 48 sec]. It is original but the 4 little Pies are new. The Blue one on the left automatically indicates where you are in your BP month [starting on 10th day in my case, and I think that may be global]. So it shows 29 of 31 days [March] have elapsed.

The first Yellow Pie is for 5 min rounding, as "inferred" by the terms and conditions of the Plan, and they show 6.5 hrs elapsed, as calculated by FFTS. The next Yellow Pie is for the RAW figures [these are from FFTS so are marginally more than the BP ones, as explained hereabove], and they say 5.6 hrs. Finally the Pong = 3 Pie shows 9.1 hrs.

So all of the 3 methods stay below 10 hrs, meaning the charge is $29.95 for all. And I might just mention that this plan has been "grandfathered" which is a Nerd term to mean no new users can use this plan but I can because I took it out under a sort of rash introductory plan to get the Blue Dongle Fairies out there in the economy. However the rorting was being applied to all plans as evidenced from screenies from others, so the rort dollars here would be representative.

The Dollars

As seen, I have chosen to blow the whistle first rather than [as for Sierra] actually get an overcharge and have to contest it. So to demonstrate the dollars to J Doe I will simply double up on all my March timings, and the results are shown below

A glance at the Maintenance Screen of the FFTS will similarly show the planning of this fraud, with dollars escalating at 321% as soon as you pass "10 hours", meaning that getting the correct version of "10 hours" is all important.

Excess costs are virtually $10 per hr [80 cents per 5 min] so the 5 minute Pie says I should have been charged at $58.75 for the rounded 13.0 hrs. The RAW Pie says $41.99 for 11.3 hrs, and the Pong = 3 says BP was planning to rort me $108.35 for 18.2 hrs had I not blown the whistle.

So the difference between the rort and the 5 min rounding is about $50 pm or $600 per annum. BP would never tell us how many Dongles etc out there so I will jump a conservative 100,000 [if not now, by the end of the year], meaning we are looking at I just saved BP customers $60 million. Then because BP were forced to go back even further to the RAW figures, there is maybe another $40 million "on the house", so maybe a very conservative $100 million.

While that is Diddly Squat to Peter Costello and would not have him "swinging from the rafters, Possums", it IS still fraud. The good news is it has been aborted at birth [and no Tony Abbott we don't need your input here]. The Sierra and Blue Kombi van users were few and while Next G is set to explode, no real damage has been done so far.

Will I litigate? - well I could but because I did not "load up my vehicle" it would be much harder, but that has never put me off before so I just might. But here's a thought for J Does and Swinging Petes to ponder. Just give me unlimited dongle use and maybe I will go away and keep blowing my whistles elsewhere.

Other features

I wrote the FFTS in the first week of January 2007 while waiting to accumulate actual data, so to road test it I put in simulated figures for the entire 2007, mainly because I built in a few diagnostic tools. Here we see by clicking on button 2007 it constructs a graph for all months.

Then as a further tool it puts your timings into all "known" plans to help you choose the plan best suited to you, including a hypothetical plan, just for kicks.

So this says that even with an average use just over 10 hours per month, because of the nasty escalation factor you would have been better off paying more for the 20 hour plan, albeit never actually using 20 hours in any month.

Not just a pretty [timing] face

But if you have recorded all the VOLUME data as well as the timings for each session, you can make a further comparison to perhaps changing to a mb plan. So when it says "and spread Good Timings to all Men & Women", that is an understatement of the TOTAL goodness of the Flying Fairy.

But remember, now that BP has been busted you are now looking at about DOUBLE the Bang for your Dollar, ie what used to be 10 hours with Pong = 3 is now more like 5 hours of the RAW times, so you can now surf for way longer. But always remember to keep an eye on the "current version" of what the BP Blue bar means, because we are all aware of Viagra and penile enlargement and that bar could be back up before you can say Future Fund. In fact I would say there will be an erection to coincide with the election, based on how Howard can get his mate Sol to dial the squirrels up and down at will in terms of Next G speed.

We have already seen from results at WP that bad polls for the government gave us a 300% increase in speed, for a short time.

Where can I get this Wondrous Fairy?

Well that question takes us directly back to Y2K, Microsoft and the Program Jocks Union. MS never released a "runtime" version of Excel4 [unlike for Lotus 123 which Excel displaced], so these amazing "custom applications" in Excel4 were virtually "just for you the creator" unless your clients had a registered ver of Excel on their PC [and at the equivalent 2007 price of $1,500 very few did]. So this was the main fear of the Y2K freaks, ie if there WAS a runtime ver, the whole mystery would be taken out of computing and smart people using Excel would flood the market with smart applications, not only killing the Y2K plan but also putting the Jocks Union out of business.

So 17 years after the dumbing down and 7 years after a successful Y2K gig, it was no surprise that as soon as I mentioned that I might release the Fairy as Shareware, a goon on WP told me in no uncertain terms that would be illegal [ie to zip in a copy of excel.exe with the Fairy]. So we have of course a huge Freudian Slip here where Jocks tell us [as they hold out their hand for payment like a blood sucking lawyer] of the ever increasing power and cleverness of "I.T. Professionals" as they call themselves, while at the same time saying please don't use the technology of 17 years ago because it makes us look stupid.

But essentially it is "mission accomplished " and BP has backed down on this rort so for now I will just sit on the Fairy, as we head for elections and possible erections.

To the New World

But wait folks, there's More!! This polemic commenced with the tortured tones of Ozzie saying "I know I am being screwed but can't seem to put my finger on it!". Well all the fingering work has been discovered and dispensed with, so we can now play the Symphony To the New World

by clicking here
Stop Clip

Here we see the New Month gleaming Yellow in the morning sun, but the main issue is the Blue bar in the BP meter [for month to 10 April], which has actually gone more flaccid still. It would seem that BP have been forced so far back on their heels in an Act of Contrition that they are doing a global [ie for whole month] rounding DOWN to nearest hour [you can see my 5 hours 30 min 6 sec is rounded back to 5 hours]. Of course that is in conflict with the evidence of the email that said some time back I had PASSED 50%, but when people panic they do desperate things.

So in effect I have given another hour "on the house" as it looks like one can use 10 hr 59 min and not go into excess. Now for sure THAT is "ME doing it right for YOU". In round terms you have gone from maybe 6 hours per month RAW time back in the bad old Pong = 3 days, to about double that at 11 RAW hours. Or to put it other way around, for 11 RAW hours you will pay $29.95 instead of about $135.00.

"Yes Virginia, that is well over $1,000 a year saving - can't be all that bad"

WP goes ballistic

As expected it took between 23 and 38 minutes only for WP goons to say "What the ?" and delete my announcement from the Forum, BUT of course offering no argument at all that I am wrong in any of the content. But par for the course. There still seems to be no agreement about putting me in sin bin, and I think the smarter ones at WP will see that such would simply be playing into my hands. As I have detailed above BP always HAD a Plan B if anyone worked out what was going on, and we have Plan B now, AND Plan B had its inbuilt anti litigation devices, eg no hourly details on the paper bill and deletion of the "5 minute rests" mention in Term & Conditions.

The Fairy then announced the good news to all in a new thread, and it remained for a day or so. But as soon as the thread mentioned that the man from ACCC was [as we speak] about to also do a Wagner and come a rat-tat-tat on the doors of Telstra, the thread was also deleted. But it was all too late as Ozzie might say:

The race is run, the book is read, the end begins to show.
The truth is out, the lies are old, but you don't want to know.