Telstraclear cable access woes

At home I use a Telstraclear cable connection to hook into the internet. My telstra cable modem connects to a 4 port wireless cable router and from there it has ethernet connections to my 2 Macs and a wireless connection to my iPod Touch. In early July I started having connection problems whereby my internet connection would intermitantly drop off for up to 30 seconds. This particurly noticable if you use your internet for web browsing or downloading things but when online gaming or using VOIP applications latency becomes a big issue. So I called Telstra and tried over several nights the usual series of tests of unplugging my router and connecting directly to the modem, monitoring the modem status, changing enternet cables around and using different PC's to connect - all to no avail. Someone from Telstra came over and replaced a few pieces of equipment - also to no avail. Eventually they put me onto Downer Engineering and so began a one week assignment of keeping in touch with those guys to help them test whether fixes they were making at their exchange made any difference. I ended up have to write a little ping script "ping www.nzherald.co.nz > pingtst.txt" and leave that running every night to record the number of ping drops over the course of an evening. Eventually they were able to fix the problem but not before I found that lots of other Telstra customers in the Wellington region were also suffering similar issues.
What bothers me is that not once did Telstra report or acknowledge that there was an issue. I'm sure that there were lots of other people around the area also went through the same hassles as I did. A simple website notice or email explaining the issue with the exchange and or an email to affected customers would have at least informed people like me that the issue isn't at their end. Note that my gripe isn't with Downer Engineering - they were very good in staying in touch and prehaps Telstra might want to take a feather out of their hat.