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Australia's largest telco to be split

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the what-would-we-do-with-a-monopoly-to-fight dept.

Pie Pants writes "Australia's largest telco company, Telstra, which is also half government-owned and controls most of the telecommunications network in Australia, is to be split into separate retail and wholesale arms. This means that the wholesale side of Telstra will have to sell the network to the retail side under the same terms it uses with other communications companies. The government has done this in a bid to improve communications service in regional Australia, so it can privatize the rest of the telco. This is a welcome move by many after Telstra was accused of taking advantage of its network against competitors."

2 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. For those in other countries... by BlackMesaLabs · · Score: 3, Informative

    Telstra (Internet division: Bigpond) has a reputation here as a cumbersome, inneffectual and generally crappy ISP. The service is shoddy & slow, the tech support takes hours to connect and technicians are worse than monkeys
    (one told me that 384Mb ram wasnt enough for cable and that 30 metres of pristine cat5 could lose ~60mbit in throughput, despite the fact that the theoretical limit of my cable was 10mbit)

    Anyway, a good british comparison would be BT and an american one could be AOL (maybe comcast)

  2. Read the article by nobbin · · Score: 4, Informative

    I thought this sounded like too bid a news story to not have heard about.
    Read the article. It doesnt say it will be split, it talks about rumors that a split might have been approved by the *cabinet*, that means the bill probably hasn't even been written yet, even if you assume that the rumour is true.
    Thats not to say it wont happen at some time in the future, but at the moment its just speculation, and the title of the story is grossly misleading