Australia's existing ADSL service is not always operating efficiently, the technology is sound but its implementation is not always suiting business. The fact that ADSL has had some bad press recently from business users is not a fault of the technology, rather its incorrect implementation. Corporate users are experiencing 'brown-outs'. However the brownouts are more likely to be a result of overly subscribed bandwidth rather than technology failures. These customers are most often using a residential service to broadcast data, when they need a business class service.
Residential users have different traffic and download patterns to business users.
While ADSL is fast the 'contention ratio' can determine the actual quality of the connection's performance. If a business ADSL has this ratio, the user's service may not then be as fast as they expect. Many are competing with Telstra, but are also a customer of theirs. Problems came about when Tesltra offered its ADSL service in a wholesale package to providers, at the time saying it would not be releasing its own retail ADSL service. Some ISPs are charging for retail services that are lower than than they buy wholesale bandwidth, and they want to know why the discrepancies are there.