The nation’s largest telco Telstra has been forced into a public apology towards much smaller ISP Exetel after the smaller ISP filed a lawsuit against Telstra in early March.

Telstra this morning posted the above apology in the Australian newspaper, with Exetel chief John Linton additionally posting on his blog that the judge in the case had decided that Telstra would pay Exetel’s court costs.

Linton never completely explained the situation behind the lawsuit, although it appears as if the case revolves around credit checking agency Veda Advantage. In Telstra’s statement this morning, the company said it had reported to Veda that Exetel had defaulted on three of its contracts, relying on third party information for the claim.

Telstra “acknowledges that these entries were incorrect and has had all of them removed from Exetel’s corporate credit report,” Telstra’s advertisement stated. In March Linton wrote he had taken Telstra to court to “attempt to get redress for the most obvious of their operational inequities.”

“There is no question that Telstra remains an organisation that is unbelievably hard to deal with and has reached a stage of contented bloatedness where even one of its legal representatives laughed without a hint of ruefulness at the concept that Telstra might like to act in a timely way to the matters being discussed,” he added.

This morning Linton crowed over those who had told him “how stupid Exetel was to take Telstra to court to force them to publicly apologise for their unconscionable behaviour, although he described Telstra’s apology as “mealy mouthed”.

Image credit: Telstra