Internode has blamed a faulty algorithm for sending notices of impending price rises to its most loyal customers, who were notified of price increases of between $10 and $60 a month.

 

While the incremental price hikes were meant only for out-of-contract customers, errors in the pricing algorithm that was used to identify and notify customers who were due for a price increase saw that loyal customers were told they too were going to be charged the price increases.

 

Internode managing director Simon Hackett addressed the issue in an open post on the Whirlpool use forum, where he said that the company intended to withdraw the notifications and repair the error in the pricing algorithm.

 

“It certainly wasn't intentional – it'd be an insane thing to do intentionally,” Mr Hackett wrote in the post.

 

“Further investigation shows that because I hadn't specified that the distribution be random (or, initially, that the distribution be biased toward shorter term customers rather than longer term ones), something bad happened,” Mr Hackett wrote.

 

“More specifically, because I hadn't specified customer 'age' at all – the code was simply written to iterate upward (literally from customer number 1 upward) through potential candidates to find those who were out of contract to send a notice to in the first batch.”

 

“And the nett effect is that the code selected that first batch of un-lucky people in the perfectly worst possible way – starting with our oldest applicable out-of-contract customer and working along from there”

 

The post can be found here