Major Australian ISP Pulls OpenOffice

thefickler writes "Australia's largest Internet service provider Telstra BigPond has removed OpenOffice from its unmetered file download area following the launch of its own, free, hosted, office application, BigPond Office. The removal of OpenOffice was brought to TECH.BLORGE's attention by a reader, who complained to Telstra BigPond's support department about no longer being able to download OpenOffice updates. The support people were quite open about why OpenOffice was no longer available, i.e. because it was perceived to be competitive with BigPond Office."

Comments

Why do they even try?

[rastoboy29]

All the big ISP's seem to be convinced they can keep people in their own little ecosystem.  God knows why.  Like, what if one of their users tries to send a file generated by their supercool Bigpond Office software to someone, I dunno, who doesn't use BigPond?  And it doesn't work?  How useful is that?

Re:Why do they even try?

[Anonymous Coward]

You stupid troll. As if anyone believes an Australian ISP hasn't been interrogated by the FBI at some point. I mean really, the last Australian government had it's head so far up GWB's ass they thought the sun came from the ground.

Re:Why do they even try?

[gardyloo]

That simile stinks!

Re:Why do they even try?

[gardyloo]

Aw... shit. I just failed junior high English based on that. I should have said, "That metaphor stinks!".

Re:Why do they even try?

[Facetious]

It's a metaphor, you insensitive clod! (Similes use "like" or "as".) It did stink, though.

Re:Why do they even try?

[neildiamond]

Useful or not, works well for China!

Re:Why do they even try?

[cmacb]

And I was trying to figure out which smiley you were referring to. :)

Re:Why do they even try?

[Seumas]

Why is an ISP providing an online office suite? They're supposed to provide internet access. Period. I don't even use my provider's email address or server. I've never logged in or touched it. I just want a tube I can back my truck up to and get internet on. Nothing more. No tools. No utilities. No portal home page thing. No applications. No office suites. No filtering. No content management. Give me the network access and the IP of your DNS servers and go the fuck away.

Re:Why do they even try?

[houstonbofh]

All the big ISP's seem to be convinced they can keep people in their own little ecosystem. God knows why. Like, what if one of their users tries to send a file generated by their supercool Bigpond Office software to someone, I dunno, who doesn't use BigPond? And it doesn't work? How useful is that?

I have a plan! I will start an ISP, but I will have my own internal e-mail to protect others from spam! I will have my own content and forums to protect you from spam, kiddy predators, and porn. I will have limited, filtered, and very slow connections to the internet to protect you from hackers. I can call it CompuServe! (I think the name became available this August...) I should make a mint in venture capital since no one reads history anymore.

Re:Why do they even try?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your on Big Pond you probably just stepped out and purchased Office for 1200 dollars since you love flushing your cash.

Re:Why do they even try?

[pla]

All the big ISP's seem to be convinced they can keep people in their own little ecosystem. God knows why.

Because the less "real" bandwidth they have to pay for, the better (from their POV).

They already have the tubes in place to provide TV or POTS. For a broadband ISP, finding a new way to charge customers (and often, more than for the original service itself) to use those same tubes amounts to icing on their cake. BUT! If they need to pay someone else so you can get out of their play area and onto the real internet, well, clearly that costs money and they must discourage it whenever possible.

So far, this all makes perfect sense, IMO.

Except when they start writing their own Office app suite. That does not make sense.

Situation Normal

[goingforaslash]

Hellstra have always put money before all else!

Other sites?

[nurb432]

Are their users restricted to only get what is offered by their ISP? If not, why not just go somewhere else to download?

Its their storage/local bandwidth that is at stake here, why should they support competing products since one is their own? Or am i missing something key here?

Re:Other sites?

[raving griff]

From what I gather, only the applications that this ISP hosts can be downloaded for free. Other applications will be metered, and the downloaders will be billed for the bandwidth they spend downloading from other sites.

Re:Other sites?

[Radon360]

I believe the issue at hand is that users of this ISP pay per Mb download or are limited by their plan on how much can be downloaded per week/month. It's not a problem of accessing those downloadables, rather a matter of now having those downloadables go against your alloted amount of data use charges when they were once offered "toll free" from the ISP.

Re:Other sites?

[ozzee]

In Australia, ADSL is a joke. Telstra was once a government owned monopoly and now it is a legislated one, owning all the last mile copper and being the only one responsible for installing new phone lines. Telstra also markets it's own ISP - Bigpond.

Telstra has no incentive to make DSL more affordable and has even taken the prior government to court over attempts of the government to do so. It appears that the only thing Telstra and Optus (the co-horts of Telstra) understand is that by holding the reigns on services and service prices in their tight control will make them more money. The "pair-gain" crazyness is another example of just how stupid the situation is.

In defence of Telstra's management, that is exactly what the arrangements of privatization regulations encourage. It really is another one of these privatizations gone crazy scenarios.

It should be of no surprise that Telstra would do this with OpenOffice. I think that the public expect Telstra to have the interests of it's customers as a primary objective but it should be no surprise that the shareholders hold the attention of the management.

The only way to fix this is to remove the monopoly protections. Telstra needs to be changed by the government and it's monopoly broken if Australia is every going to get services that are other than a joke.

Having said that, the new Rudd government has made a pledge to make improvements in internet access, although I think it's going to be a hard one to pull off.

Re:Other sites?

[zotz]

Perhaps conflict of interest? Improper product tying?

all the best,

drew

Re:Other sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not improper product tying. Under Australian law, Bigpond can sell or make available whatever products it wants, in the same way that you can't force a retailer to stock a particular product.

Bigpond would be breaking the law if it attempted to restrict its users from downloading Open Office from other sources, but this is not what it's doing.

Most Bigpond plans give you a download/upload allowance, but on top of that allowance you have 'unmetered' downloads that Bigpond makes available -- typically music, movies and games.

Bigpond users can still download Open Office -- it just counts against their allowance.

And Bigpond users who have unlimited plans can download as much as they want.

Re:Other sites?

[CaptainDefragged]

Tel$tra aren't restricting anything per se. What this is all about is that Tel$tra BigPond charge for data as well as bandwidth. They also charge for backhaul, so your 200mb plan (for $29.95 / month for 24 months) includes all traffic in both directions. Now, while this sounds crap, they do provide some areas of hosted content that are not included in that 200mb. There is FileArena, which provideds Australian mirrors of popular files. There is also GameArena, which has popular game downloads (demos/patches/etc) as well as game servers. The reason I use the 200mb example is because that is the plan that has been pushed heavily through the media for the past couple of years. From TFA it would appear that OO has been removed from FileArena. Sucks if you are on the 200mb plan.
Most people that have a clue stay as far away from Tel$tra as is possible, so I find it most surprising that "an IT veteran with more than 25 years experience in the IT industry" would go anywhere near BigPond. Telstra are blood sucking leeches and this kind of move is not in the least be surprising.
Although not unmetered, if you want a fast Australian mirror of this sort of thing, first port of call should be http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/ which is only accessable to Australians.

Re:Other sites?

[ScrewMaster]

They also charge for backhaul, so your 200mb plan (for $29.95 / month for 24 months) includes all traffic in both directions.

Jesus H. Christ! Just 200 megabytes a month? Sounds like you guys would welcome Comcast or Verizon.

Re:Other sites?

[maxwell demon]

Mo, 200 megabytes would be 200MB. Since he said 200mb, it's 200 millibits. In other words, you may download for free one bit every five months.

SCNR

Re:Other sites?

[_KiTA_]

Are their users restricted to only get what is offered by their ISP? If not, why not just go somewhere else to download?

Its their storage/local bandwidth that is at stake here, why should they support competing products since one is their own? Or am i missing something key here?

Isn't Australia one of those backwards countries who still pay per meg downloaded, unless you're downloading off an official ISP server? If so, pulling a 100 meg file might be a few bucks...

Re:Other sites?

[dbIII]

Somebody could be on a 200MB/month plan and then has to pay $150/GB for the excess bandwith. Telstra's broadband charging is horrible so people try to get things from the local unmetered mirror as much as possible.

Re:Other sites?

[ScrewMaster]

Oh, okay. That's not so bad then.

Re:Other sites?

[nurb432]

I think at $150 a GB, id disconnect and not bother.

Re:Other sites?

[Dmala]

Good lord, is the entire continent stuck in 1993?

Re:Other sites?

[Starayo]

Plans like that are for the technophobic. Nobody who knows the slightest thing about what they're doing goes with Telstra.

Re:Other sites?

[ScrewMaster]

Well, if the percentage of the Australian population that doesn't know what they're doing is anything comparable to the percentage of the U.S. population that doesn't know what they're doing, I'm sure Telstra is very profitable.

Re:Other sites?

[deniable]

Tell that to the farmers. Big Pong satellite was the only decent option in some areas, especially with government install rebates.

Re:Other sites?

[Ramadog]

Jesus H. Christ! Just 200 megabytes a month? Sounds like you guys would welcome Comcast or Verizon.

Look for yourself http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/isp.cfm/Telstra-BigPond/1.html

Even on their highest speed cable plan the quota starts at 200 meg a month.

Re:Other sites?

[ScrewMaster]

My god. Is that excess data column actually saying they'll charge a $150AU per GB if you go over?

There's a point where you're going to have to take your Internet back at gunpoint. These guys are chiselers.

Re:Other sites?

[Ramadog]

That is exactly what it says. The bigpond section of whirpool is always fun to read seeing who has been hit with a 4 digit monthly net bill.

Re:Other sites?

[DavidRawling]

No, not the entire continent, just Tel$tra.

It's such a wonderful company name too:

T ell
E verybody
L ies
S o
T hat
R evenue
A ccumulates

(I can't take credit for it, it's not mine. But I still like it. And it's still true.)

Re:Other sites?

[TapeCutter]

No, Telstra is stuck in 1993. The rest of us don't know what day it is and don't care.

Re:Other sites?

[rmerry72]

They also charge for backhaul, so your 200mb plan (for $29.95 / month for 24 months) includes all traffic in both directions. Jesus H. Christ! Just 200 megabytes a month? Sounds like you guys would welcome Comcast or Verizon.

Yup, all the majors down here "offer" that service for that price point. Its a caseof if that type of service is enough for you you don't need the internet at all and your tooling $30 a month down the dunny. Better then people pay $100/mnth for reruns on Foxtel (our version of cable) so its not like people have any better use for the money. Might as well got to Telstra. God know CEO Sol and his possy need the money for their own pockets.

As I seen on another post "Friends do not let Friends use Pig Puddle". Family members you don't like - encourage them. More bandwidth for the rest of us :-)

Re:Other sites?

[DRobson]

My parents-in-law are (last I hear) on a 400MiB monthly plan through Telstra (aka BigPong). Last time I installed OpenOffice on my machine I downloaded over 120MiB of data. So, you're essentially limited to downloading large files through the BigPond mirrors or using a substantial fraction of your quota. If it was any other ISP I dont think there would be much of a fuss at all.

Re:Other sites?

[rmerry72]

My god. Is that excess data column actually saying they'll charge a $150AU per GB if you go over?

That's it. Cheaper to fly Open Office express on gold plated DVDs. Don't you love it when business types fuck up a good thing like the Internet.

Re:Other sites?

[Froster]

My god that overage fee is high. My ISP just changed its fee/service structure so that Unlimited DSL service is $39.95 Canadian, and DSL with a 200 GB cap is $29.95 (previously the two were both $29.95 and the capped service had a 100G cap). The kicker is that the overage charge with my ISP is 25 cents per GB or 10 cents if you buy it ahead in 100G blocks.

To see Telstra charge for overages at a rate up to 1300 times the rate here in Canada with my ISP is stunning. Just absolutely stunning

Re:Other sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

sadly telstra (the parent company of Bigpond) owns all of the copper wire / lines in Australia,
This monopoly is due to the company previously being government owned but then being sold off piece by piece.
The draw back to this seemingly brilliant piece of economic management is that the government in turn didn't actually take back ownership of the tax payer funded lines.
Thus where once Australia had a government run telecommunications monopoly (which was harsh but still run by the people), we now have a private business with a telecommunications monopoly.

This means that all isps in australia are purchasing internet access from telstra, so even if you move away from Bigpond you are still paying telstra for the access.

Hopefully Rudd will beat the company into pieces

Re:Other sites?

[Erpo]

Or am i missing something key here?

Yes. The home broadband Internet situation in Australia is atrocious. For example, Optus customers have low monthly transfer caps and pay $150/GB downloaded or uploaded past that: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/15837/1085/ . Just google for australia broadband for more examples of how bad the service is in that country.

For a while, Telstra had apparently partially hidden its terrible business practices by hosting certain file downloads such as OpenOffice (so that they would not be counted towards monthly transfer caps). They are no longer doing this, once again exposing customers to huge fees and poor service.

So no, an ISP has no obligation to host file downloads and customers are free to download OpenOffice elsewhere--kind of.

Re:Other sites?

[Gandalf_Greyhame]

No, they are not restricted to only getting what is offered by the ISP, however, any downloads that come from BigPond's servers are free of charge for Telstra BigPond customers. When you consider the outrageous prices that they have on their plans, you will quickly understand why their customers would be annoyed, possibly even outraged, at losing free access to OpenOffice (or any other program) bigpond.com plans

I did look at signing up with BigPond, but when I looked at the lovely fine print regarding excess usage charges ($0.17/MB) as well as their higher than average plan costs ($79.95 a month for 25GB @ 1500/256kbps) PLUS home phone line rental of about $30 a month

Re:Other sites?

[petermgreen]

I suspect the difference is that downloads from the ISPs mirror don't count towards the users traffic quota.

Re:Other sites?

[The Fanta Menace]

And even that is utterly crap. Well, my parents are with their competitor, via uses the Optus satellite. 500MB, plus the friggen delay caused by earth-to-sky and back down again, which makes it all but useless for web 2.0 applications - and that is exactly what my parents need it for. They swear they were better off on modem, but at some point, something happened to the lines and no modem we tried could remain online for longer than 10 or so minutes.

Re:Other sites?

[myvirtualid]

Hey, why not mention them by name? I think it's worth supporting "the little guys" not only with my $$$ but by /vertisement!

Seriously, though, as geeks it behooves us all to support techcos that offer good service at good prices, deliver value, actually have a person answer the phone on the first or second ring, and aren't knobs.

I went to teksavvy in the first place for the price, the low cost fixed IP, and the "it's your connection, do with it as you will" philosophy (servers are OK, no traffic shaping - at least none that negatively impacts my downloads or uploads, regardless of protocol), and having been there a while, I'd be willing to pay a monthly "not a bunch of knobs like the artful dodger major cable provider and nationwide unsympathetic DSL provider, both of whom shall remain nameless" premium.

Re:Other sites?

[Froster]

You're right, they do deserve a mention. When I tell people about how great Teksavvy's service is, they ask how much extra it will cost. When I tell them that its cheaper, they ask why I didn't tell them sooner. Everything else aside, the customer service is what does it for me. I really appreciate having someone there to answer the phone. I appreciated even more the help that they gave to my girlfriend when she needed to reconfigure our DSL modem after its settings were reset and I was out of town. She couldn't get in touch with me, so she called teksavvy, and they walked her through the process even though we have an unsupported modem that was bought refurbished from somewhere else.

Re:Other sites?

[ScrewMaster]

Well, I don't know how it is down under, but when someone applies for, say, a bus driver job, or some other position where there's the potential to hurt or otherwise screw over a lot of people ... we try to weed out the obvious bad apples. I mean, you wouldn't want a child molester driving a school bus, now would you. Seems to me that if you want to run a major corporation, you should have to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that you aren't a complete asshole and/or moron. And you should be required to go up for re-certification every year ... fail, and you go back to driving that bus.

MS also don't host OOo

[Amiga Lover]

In further news, Microsoft, creator of MS Office, also do not host downloads of Openoffice.org. More news at 11. maybe. if no real news appears before then

Re:MS also don't host OOo

[tepples]

Microsoft, creator of MS Office, also do not host downloads of Openoffice.org There's a big difference: Telstra charges rates for international traffic that the rest of the world considers exorbitant by at least an order of magnitude, while Microsoft's U.S. broadband partners do not.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Isaac-Lew]

I believe the issue is that for Australians using this ISP, downloading it from www.openoffice.org will incur bandwidth charges (as opposed to downloading the competing application from the ISP's official download siter).

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Rinisari]

Unfortunately for people whose connections are metered, it is. The ISP in question meters its users' usage, but had OpenOffice in an area where users could download freely without being metered. The ISP removed OpenOffice from that area, so its users now much use ~100 MB of bandwidth to download OpenOffice and its updates.

Why is this news ?

[Alain Williams]

They want to sell more of their product so they take something else out of the front window.

They are an ISP, if they blocked their customers from reaching http://www.openoffice.org/ that would be news.

Re:Why is this news ?

[fm6]

Why is this news? Because it's an important move by a major ISP, a blow to Open Office, and a milestone on the road from local applications to web hosted applications.

Why should we be up in arms about this? Nobody said we should be. There are other reasons to care about events, believe it or not.

Re:Why is this news ?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

They want to sell more of their product so they take something else out of the front window.

I don't know about that. They're presumably paying the licensing fee to offer ThinkFree to their internet customers, instead of offering OpenOffice for free. Also, we're not talking about the "front window" by any means. They just have a cache of software they provide from their own servers without charging you for the data transfer costs (since they don't have to pay transit). It would cost them basically nothing to leave OpenOffice on that server. I might even buy into a MS backroom deal conspiracy theory here, as it only supports MSOffice formats, but it does not support OOXML and exports to PDF so maybe not. I wonder what the Australian government agencies that are standardizing on ODF will think of this.

Re:Why is this news ?

[david_craig]

In the Australian market, Telstra is a state run ISP and phone company. While they do not have an outright monopoly, they own the vast majority of the countries infrastructure. Almost all other ISPs use Telstra's infrastructure, so there is little competition. With Telstra's home use internet connection (as is the case with all home internet connections) you have a limited amount of data you can download per month. A basic account only offers you 200MB of downloads per month. You are charged on a per MB basis for exceeding that amount. Telstra does not count the downloads from a limited number of sites, so downloads from those places are free.

Removing OpenOffice from one of these sites means that many people who are on the smaller Telstra plans will have to PAY to downloaded it.

And if you live in Australia, and you don't like it then it's just tough. Almost all other ISPs have similar pricing structures as Telstra, because Telstra is selling the connections to them and they setting the prices. An un-metered domestic internet plan in Australia means that your connection speed is dropped back to dail-up speeds when you reach a certain limit.

For an idea of how expensive internet connections are in Oz, look at the pricing here:

http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansandoffers/default.jsp

This is news for people who live in Australia.

Re:Why is this news ?

[F1re]

Used to be state run but not anymore.

Re:Why is this news ?

[david_craig]

Sorry, yes, Telstra is now privately run company, with partial state ownership.

Re:Why is this news ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the key words are "unmetered area" not "Open Office".

It sounds like they bill based on bandwidth and had Open Office in their "unmetered" area so users could download it "for free". They've removed it from the unmetered area so now users are paying their ISP fees + whatever metric fee they're charged for a 100+mb download. That's why it's news.

Of course, those of us in the States wouldn't know about such things.

Re:Why is this news ?

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you live in Australia, and you don't like it then it's just tough. Almost all other ISPs have similar pricing structures as Telstra, because Telstra is selling the connections to them and they setting the prices. This isn't really true. Yes, they get connections from Telstra, but almost every ISP has better terms, conditions and prices to Telstra.

Re:Why is this news ?

[deniable]

Also used to be a better phone company. The service was excellent if a bit slow. Now, all of the old techs who built the system are bailing out. I dread faults calls now.

Re:Why is this news ?

[Adambomb]

Glad to know its not only canada that fell for that one. Our versions called Bell.

Re:Why is this news ?

[nobodymk2]

No one seems to be reading the comments/article. It is a metered internet service. Downloading openoffice from the openoffice.org site will take up approximately all of your allowed bandwidth. The openoffice download used to be on the unmetered section. This will stop them from using proxy servers as well, as they are charged per kb in addition to monthly fees.

Re:Why is this news ?

[a.ameri]

I passionately despise Telstra as much as the next Aussie here (and as a VoIP service provider, we have our daily confrontations with them), but seriously:

• where do you get that 200 MB download limit from? Telstra's plans start from 600 MB per month.
  
  
• You are a fool if you are going with BigPond anyway. It is horrendously expensive (for the same $70 which BigPond gives you 600 MB, you can get a TPG ADSL2+ account with 150 GB monthly download limit or look for Internode or iiNet if you want quality service). BigPond is vastly inferior to anything under the sun. Contention ratios of 500:1 are quite common on their residential plans.
  
  
• Yes, most other ISPs do use Telstra gear in the background (well, they own 90%+ of the exchanges anyway), but Telstra Wholesale and Telstra Retail are quite distinct beasts, and the former is heavily regulated to allow other ISP to use Telstra's infrasturcutre. Their Retail division is a shambles.

Re:Why is this news ?

[jedidiah]

In case you haven't been paying attention...

It's news because using this ISP charges highway robbery prices for non-mirrored downloads.

This ISP is should be the posterboy for "net neutrality".

Re:Why is this news ?

[fm6]

If that's the main issue, than this is a local story.

Re:Why is this news ?

[david_craig]

where do you get that 200 MB download limit from? Telstra's plans start from 600 MB per month. The 200MB a month was from Telstra's Bigpond pricing and plan page on their web site. I included that link in my original post, but here it is again.

http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansandoffers/default.jsp

You are a fool if you are going with BigPond anyway. I don't use BigPond, but lots of Australian's do. Many got BigPond because it was the only way they could get cable.

Telstra Wholesale and Telstra Retail are quite distinct beasts, and the former is heavily regulated to allow other ISP to use Telstra's infrasturcutre. I've dealt with the Telstra's business retail arm through the reseller channel, and Telstra employee often brag about the things that they can get away with.

Re:Why is this news ?

[jedidiah]

NOT AT ALL.

Like I said: These people should be held up as examples in every discussion of net neutrality anywhere on the planet of why ISPs should not be given free reign to do whatever they like. ...posterboys for net neutrality.

Re:Why is this news ?

[fm6]

DON'T SHOUT. IT'S RUDE!

The problem here is not that the ISP took some software off its own servers. The problem here is that the ISP is charging extortionate rates to access any servers not its own. Which means 99% of the internet. That's a very bad thing and you should do something about it. But it has nothing to do with net neutrality. It has to do with the fact that you're paying an extortionate per-packet charge, something that's peculiar to Oz.

Net neutrality means that the ISP provides equal priority to network traffic whatever the source. The alternative is to allow ISPs to strike deals with content providers to give their traffic priority. That means that applications that require a lot of bandwidth such as VoIP or streaming video could become the monopoly of a few companies. So if all the California ISPs decided to give priority to AT&T VoIP (quite possible, since AT&T is itself a big ISP in the state, and provides network infrastructure to most other ISPs), you can forget about using Vonage. I don't mean that Vonage would costs extra, I mean that you wouldn't be able to get it for any price.

Screwing over your customers by making them pay too much for most services, and screwing over your customers by restricting what services they can access at all are both evil. But they are two completely different evils. And the one evil is peculiar to where you live, whereas the other is a global issue.

Re:Why is this news ?

[F1re]

The 'partial state ownership' is via the future fund which is basically the super fund for commonwealth public servants so I would say that there is no state ownership anymore.

Oh no!

[TheDarkener]

Now where will people get OpenOffice???

Oh wait.

Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Lendrick]

Company doesn't want to supply free bandwidth to a competitor, so they pull that competitor's download. Consumers can still download the competitor's product for free elsewhere on the internet. I just can't bring myself to be outraged about this.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Gideon Fubar]

I imagine it'd be much easier if you were used to Telstra's corporate policy. There's a lot of bad karma there.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Lendrick]

Well, metered access is definitely outrage-worthy, don't get me wrong. The problem is the metered access, though, and not the fact that they're not offering a specific product for download.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[BlueParrot]

If you think about it for a second, this is the edge of the wedge when it comes to destroying net-neutrality. What happens when they start letting you send documents encoded in their format "for free" or "at reduced cost" ? I bet their customers pay a subscription fee which means that you can just as well view this as charging more for downloading OO.org as it is ceasing to charge it reduced cost. Let this slip and you will soon be paying extra to e-mail customers not on their network. Of course, it will be touted as "free bandwidth if you e-mail customers at this network" , which sounds good, until you realise nothing is free, and that what they are really doing is to charge you for the bandwidth using a subscription fee, and then charge you extra every time you download a competitors product. This will end in anti-trust mark my words.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you'll find many unmetered ISPs in Australia.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Gideon Fubar]

Aaah, if only metered downloads were the actual problem.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[timmarhy]

But it's NOT free you dickhead, access to the bigpond mirror sites is part of your agreement if your a bigpond customer. by making those mirror sites less useful they have degraded your service without offering anything to combinsate you.

Anyone from australia who is familar with telstra won't be suprised by this move, they are the biggest bunch of cunts i've ever seen. this same company wanted to charge $32 for shared access to phone lines, and after careful invesgiation our regulartory body here the accc ruled a price of $3 - $9 was the price that still made telstra a profit and allowed competition. telstra were effectively double dipping, charging the customers line rental and charging ISP's using the lines even more for the same thing. they charged these fee's under the guise of maintanence costs, even though 8% or more of phone lines have serious service issues ranging from no dial tone to being so static that a conversation is impossible.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Anonymous Coward]

gimme a break, only the very clueless within Australia use Telstra as an ISP. They are under no obligation to provide you or anyone with free downloads. I am with internode, they change peer sharing stuff all the time. Get over it, yes if your clueless enough to be using telstra you are then also probably too incompetant to find the openoffice site, but that is your problem not theres.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Aussie]

only the very clueless within Australia use Telstra as an ISP
ADSL isn't everywhere you know, some of us have no choice in the matter.

People should note that the "free" download area provided by Telstra is a selling point of their service and is often used as a defense for their high usage charges, if it is now only Telstra sanctioned files that can be downloaded they have degraded the service without notification.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[thegrassyknowl]

I just can't bring myself to be outraged about this.

I can - Hellstra is nothing more than a communications provider. Why should they start getting in on the online application space? Their analog phone service offering works most of the time but their service to their customers is ratshit when it doesn't work.

Hellstra as a company put in artificial blocks at their wholesale dept to screw over the competition and help out BigPong. Their whole "it won't do 1500kbps" rule was a farce. I couldn't get ADSL at my property for years because of that crappy rule. Now I have an ADSL2 plan that's locked to ADSL1 and syncs at 4.5-5Mbit with supreme stability.

They are a phone company. Let them be a phone company and not try and trample on every other type of business with half-arsed offerings. Microsoft springs to mind here; they were an OS company who decided to trample other types of software areas as well with half-arsed offerings.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Zizkus]

How informed,

This isn't about supplying free bandwidth to a competitor, it's about charging totally outrageous charges for bandwidth and screwing your customers, They pay for bandwidth only to their peers so deciding to remove OO from the local free cache (which includes most other frequent downloads for popular software) is obviously an attempt to force customers to use the web biased product which isn't even a direct competitor to OO, and more importantly it saves them nothing in bandwidth costs!

I have a dedicated server at a data center in the US, 4MB of unmetered bandwidth, 5 static IPs, this only cost's me about USD $79 per Month, Their cost per GB for bandwidth shows that they are obviously taking extreme advantage of their customers , just like the $3000 (or was it ($8000)) per gallon cost of ink jet ink shows that the printer manufactures are taking unconscionable advantage of a enforced monopoly.

The printer manufactures continue to make new printers with cartridges that hold less and less ink, what does this tell you?

This ISP without effective competition appears able to continue to squeeze their customers more and exploit their effective monopoly even to the extent of trying to force a incompatible web biased application along with the privacy issues involved on their own customers.

FYI: The difference in price per page for printing color (or BW) documents on a laser printer is at least 20 to 1, so you can essentially recoup the cost of a laser printer in just a few months if you print much.

With best regards to those who must deal with Big Pond, I hope your government deals with this injustice soon.

Bill

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of a single ISP in Australia that doesn't have a free download area and there is nowhere in Australia where Telstra is the only choice or even the best choice. Even outback Australia you have many options that are cheaper and better than Telstra for both pstn (dialup) and satelite where DSL is not available, both of which I have had to do in the past few years.

Anyone that treats telstra's free downloads as a good selling point simply has no idea about other ISP's in Australia. User ignorance is the only reason to go with telstra.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[timmarhy]

what so it's ok to rip off people because they are clueless? here's a hint - people are under no obligation to be an expert on something to purchase it, and the burden is on the provider to be fair.

oh and yes internode dropped a whole bunch of peering a while back and there was a motherfucking HUGE out cry about it so don't give me this dribble about it not mattering.

Telstra is THE isp that is out there pushing the mantra "content is king" and now they think it's ok to start pulling that content?

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Melbourne Pete]

I just can't bring myself to be outraged about this. Oh, come on! You can do it!

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Aussie]

and there is nowhere in Australia where Telstra is the only choice or even the best choice.
My option is Cable Only, Telstra or Optus and Optus doesn't allow you to run a server, PSTN or satellite have other problems.

Anyone that treats telstra's free downloads as a good selling point simply has no idea about other ISP's in Australia.
Well duh, it is Telstra making the claims.

The point is that Telstra said that we don't need lots of bandwidth as we can download large files *on request* from the free download area and now they are attempting to restrict what can be downloaded. Thus they have reduced the value of their service.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Lendrick]

But the real source of this outrage, again, is the fact that they're metering bandwidth *at all*. If their bandwidth were unmetered (as any non-crappy ISP would be) then this wouldn't be an issue, because the download would be free from *anywhere*.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[a.ameri]

Mate, I would soooo love to pay your mortgage/rent for that huge mansion you live in in the outback, but I decided to pay the price and live in the city to use the amenities and services available here, including DSL.

You made your choice by living outside the 60 km zone of any of the 5 big cities (ADSL is now available in CBD and Zone 1 areas in all 5 major cities). Please don't ask us to subsedise your last-mile infrastructure when you expect a telco to invest hundereds of thousands of dollars to support all 3 families living in your area.

Besides, Optus now offers 2Mbps SHDSL ANYWHERE in Australia, it only costs about $4,000.00 per month though. Add that to your mortgate, and you're probably still paying less than what I'm paying to live in the city...

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[jedidiah]

Do you have any clue what you are saying?

Restrict an entire country's population (even one as sparsely populated as Australia) to 5 36m diameter circles?

Are you mad?

36m won't even get you "out of the city" in some places.

Part of being a natural monopoly, and getting to soak all the customers is that you have to build out infastructure to everywhere.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[jonbryce]

Very good. In Britain, ADSL is available to about 99.8% of the population. Basically to find yourself without ADSL availability, you would need to be living in a farmhouse in a particularly remote part of the Scottish highlands.

Re:Wow, how slightly irritating...

[Aussie]

You made your choice by living outside the 60 km zone of any of the 5 big cities (ADSL is now available in CBD and Zone 1 areas in all 5 major cities).

hehe, I live well within 60km of Sydney.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[nurb432]

But wait, i now see the big deal which i missed before i posted, the key word here is 'unmetered'. I didn't realize that they were still sticking it to their users like the bad old days of the likes of genie and CompuServe dial-up, pay per use bandwidth.

So, I guess downloading OO from somewhere else counts against your time and i assume costs money. Before they pulled it, it was free to fetch.

sucks to be them.

How about forcing their customers too..

[LingNoi]

I hate your font, it's so damn small..

Anyway on with the topic, I have one better then that.

What if the ISP restricted file transfers of .odt files since after all it would "be competitive with BigPond Office".

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[palegray.net]

That, my friend, is what SSL is all about.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[tubapro12]

The point is they were previously getting free bandwidth to download OO.org. But now, after the ISP released a competing version, they're not providing free bandwidth to download OO.org.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[WilliamTS99]

They are not restricting anything, they just stopped subsidizing the download of OpenOffice.org.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[maxwell demon]

I hate your font, it's so damn small..

It's not his font, it's whatever font is set in your browser for fixed width content. In other words, it's your font which is too small. Change your browser settings and the font will get bigger (I know because I did so).

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[mjwx]

Tesltra is not blocking anything, they have just removed the Open Office installer from their unmetered downloads area (All residential broadband accounts in Australia are metered unfortunately, an unmetered account costs in the vicinity of 4 to 5 times as much if you are lucky). Which basically means they've removed it from their own servers, not blocking it in any way what so ever.

Telstra is not the first choice for anyone with half a brain, they sucker in the less tech or financially savy with deals like tieing in a mobile, landline and broadband account for 10% off (doest apply to calls and other crap in the fine print). Compared to plans offered by iinet and internode (iinet's not the cheapest either but hosts its own apt repository which is unmetered) telstra's plans are severely overpriced.

Telstra owns all the copper in Australia but thanks to some propper planning and healthy regulation the govenment sets the price that competitors can use this copper. Telstra has been a major stumbling block in the FTTN project (Fibre To The Node) as it wants to enjoy the same monopoly it does now despite the fact that other ISP's and me the Australian Tax Payer also will have paid a share. Under the previous government telstra was hit fairly hard with the regulation hammer for uncompetitive practices and the new government doesn't look like they are going to be any more lenient to Telstra, the Australian government is not as corporate friendly as the US govt. If they even tried filtering ODF files the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) will come down on them like a ton of bricks.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[rtb61]

That of course is a lie. For an ISP any direct downloads from ISP to customer are saving money. Downloads that have to come from different sites from different networks cost money not only for the ISP but also naturally enough for the customer. As Open Office would be a really regular download it would be served by a proxy server any how, so basically Telstra are selling Open Office by charging for downloads that are basically costing them nothing.

This from a company that at one stage were disconnecting people from mobile phone service who had terminal illnesses because it was to hard to collect the final bill from the deceased estate, no joke, they are really that low, petty and a truly disgusting company (the real interesting part of that story was how they were able to find out that customers had terminal illnesses).

In Australia friends don't let friends get used by PigPuddle. They instead send them here http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/ and give them every opportunity to become an informed customer.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[beav007]

SSL works by making the font so small that you can't read it? INGENIOUS!

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[WilliamTS99]

So by this thought, anything that can be cached by a proxy server shouldn't be charged for? That doesn't make any sort of sense at all.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[Ramadog]

In Australia friends don't let friends get used by PigPuddle. They instead send them here http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/ and give them every opportunity to become an informed customer.

That is fine for friends but it does not help with parents. The names Telecom and Telstra have been around all their lives. It is the known brand. It is a big player so it must be better than any they have not heard of.

Even so parents eventually learn. It took less then 1 month before mum started realising that with the 1500/256 400 meg plan she was on actually gave her less freedom on the net than the no quota dialup plan she was using previously. With contract payout value she is not moving anywhere soon.

I found a way of getting the point across. Put it in terms of youtube videos. Point out with bigpond they might be able to watch a couple of youtube videos + their normal usage with bigpond compared to hundreds or thousands depending on which other isp.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate your font, it's so damn small..

That's the infamous Moz PRE bug that showed up way back in 1.0 and still hasn't been fixed. There's a work-around, but most web devs don't bother and are just fed up that the high-profile OSS Moz doesn't fix it.

I've no idea what they're whining about, it's only been five and a half fucking years since the bug was reported.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[rtb61]

You are paying for the connection and set data download limit, hence paying for the infrastructure and a fairly generous profit margin, so no sense for the senseless but then since when did greed make any sense at all.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[Seumas]

How long until they stop "subsidizing" the access of competing office suites? How long until you can't access docs.google.com, because it's a competing online office product or google.com/ig, because it competes with the provider's own "portal" home page? Or looking at the pages of competing service providers, so you can't switch to them?

Granted, all they were doing here is cutting off free access to a download that was singled out previously... but the logic that "because they're competing with our stuff" is easily and validly extrapolated to all sorts of possibilities.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[Michael Wardle]

I don't know why people insist on explicitly using tt or pre tags in their comments. Use the default formatting and then everyone can get the font they want by using their browser settings.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not blocking openoffice at all. You can still download it from openoffice.org and the only problem is that it still counts to your monthly data cap (10gb?)

I am in New Zealand with the exact same problem, only ours is called Telecom / Xtra. Whenever we do anything, it counts to our data caps. They closed down the unmetered servers a few years ago which you used to be able to get full speed gaming and 6-8mbit download speeds of the linux iso's or anything they had on there.

Telstra never had to offer the service, it was just something to make things a little faster for their customers, and cheaper for them to supply.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[boarsai]

Worse? What happens when you switch ISP from them to another... can you still use their (inferior?) service or are you out in the cold again?

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[sumdumass]

Are we sure about this? The story submission says "department about no longer being able to download OpenOffice updates" which to me indicates that he couldn't even connect to an update server.

Unless something in the OO.o telstra offers looks specifically to their servers for the updates. Otherwise, I don't know how this could be only "they just stopped subsidizing the download of OpenOffice.org". Maybe I should just read the article. It could be that the story is exaggerating and dramatizing the problem. Attempt to specifically make it look worse then it is.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[yoyhed]

Well how many times do people need to download OpenOffice? Does Australia have CDs? DVDs? Thumb drives? External hard drives? Partitions? ;-)

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[Whiteox]

I found a way of getting the point across. Put it in terms of youtube videos. Point out with bigpond they might be able to watch a couple of youtube videos + their normal usage with bigpond compared to hundreds or thousands depending on which other isp.

I told my mum that the plan she agreed to was like a 'soup kitchen during the Depression'.
She understood and is very careful when she uses the net. 200mb is useless.
She's so aware, that when her brother or grandchildren visit, she monitors them carefully, not to download Utube etc.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[True Vox]

Whadayamean? Greed makes a LOT of cents... ;)

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[kfort]

They are assholes who can't speak like normal people

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[ACDChook]

All residential broadband accounts in Australia are metered unfortunately This is the main point that I think, as an Australian, needs to be pointed out to our American friends about the state of internet access here. For any complaints they may have about possibly being slowed down at soft limits like 100GB or more in the US, I do find it difficult to really feel bad for them when I am faced with the reality of a crappy limit of maybe 20GB peak, 40GB off-peak downloads, for which I'm paying $70 a month, plus having to bundle my phone with the same provider and pay another $25 a month for line rental. Or I pay Then I am shaped to the ridiculous speed of 64k. To be honest, 60GB a month is a good amount for me, and shaping would not be a problem, if it was to a usable speed. However, in this day and age, I just feel that 64k is simply too low. Even 128k would be a marked improvement, and would at least allow me to do simple things like checking email and general web browsing adequately while I waited to be unshaped.

PLEASE, Australian ISPs - someone cut your crazy profit margins and give us a reasonable download allowance, and usable shaped speed.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by posts from Australian players on the World of Warcraft forums, Australian users use the Carrier Pigeon IP method, resulting in pings in the billions of milliseconds. Also, the birds really don't react well to the lasers used to burn info onto CDs.

Re:How about forcing their customers too..

[Michael Wardle]

Well that's one possibility I guess. :-)

Not really news

[pkadd]

...unless you count "acting as any company with some sense of business-strategy would have done" as news.

Re:Not really news

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if they were really smart they would have kept an old, buggy version of OO on the site. Or even introduce some bugs in the updates they host. To tarnish the competition.

Re:Not really news

[pkadd]

THAT would have been news

Re:Not really news

[aeschenkarnos]

You're not Australian, are you? If you were, you'd realise that "acting as any company with some sense of business-strategy" is just not what Telstra does. Telstra's business strategy is this: (1) Be the biggest dog; (2) Stay firmly seated in the manger, growling.

Re:Not really news

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, they're doing what a company with any sense would do. That doesn't make it right.

Bigpond, the ISP, found that it was to their advantage to offer OpenOffice for unmetered download. Bigpond, the new provider of a remote office application, is harmed by this. By allowing one to influence the other, Bigpond is leveraging their market share in the ISP business to boost their new product, rather than allowing it to compete on its own merits. Any economist would be able to tell you why this is a bad thing.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty trivial matter. 1 GB of download to get a copy of OpenOffice isn't going to strain anyone's limit. It's worth recognising, though, that from a free-market idealistic perspective, Bigpond's ISP and remote-office businesses should be in separate companies, to eliminate the conflict of interest.

Re:Not really news

[dangitman]

How does this make sense as a business strategy? I don't think getting bad press for no benefit to your business whatsoever counts as smart strategy. All it does is reinforces the popular image of Telstra as a bunch of wankers who are out of touch. Their brand is rapidly declining because of stupid shit like this. This will only lose them customers. The smart thing to do would be to leave Open Office up there and promote their application in the mass media. Removing Open Office just screams "our product can't compete, so we have to pretend that alternatives don't exist."

So?

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

I don't see the big deal. They're just saying that if you want to download OpenOffice (a product they feel competes with their services) you'll have to pay for the privilege rather than offer it to you as an unmetered download. Not a particularly enlightened approach, but they are certainly within their rights to do this. You can still download open office from lots of other places. Download it, throw a copy on your USB thumbdrive and give it away to as many people as you like. :)

Cheers,

Re:So?

[tepples]

You can still download open office from lots of other places. But how much is airfare to those places?

Re:So?

[ross.w]

As others have pointed out though, BigPuddle is one of the few ISPs that charge large amounts for any data used above a fairly miserable monthly allocation (for the price compared to other Australian ISPs). Therefore, by removing this from their free server, they're forcing people to pay their $150Gb to download Office - if that download takes them over their monthly quota, which may be as low as 200Mb. This will discourage people who are Telstra users to bother using OpenOffice.

Having said that, most people who are on the savvy level of the average Slashdotter wouldn't bother with Bigpuddle. Their market is the AOL demographic, because they can charge a lot of money to those who don't realise they can get a better deal elsewhere, and who go to Telstra because they appear to be a "safe" option. They've probably also stayed with Telstra for their phone as the "default" option because shopping for a better deal is too confusing and difficult.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[stoolpigeon]

Then they need this one: http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom/index.html#cdrom

I can't think up a good reason as to why this company should subsidize a competing product.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[palegray.net]

To quote what I feel is the best part of the article:

"The action also seems to be driven by a lack understanding of what BigPond Office is actually about. As a hosted online application, BigPond Office is useful for people who want to access their documents from different machines; it's not really a viable alternative to Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. BigPond Office is competing with the likes of Google Docs, and is really only of interest to BigPond users who can access BigPond Office without using up their monthly bandwidth quota. It's highly unlikely that someone would download OpenOffice, instead of signing up for BigPond Office."

I don't think it's a misunderstanding on the part of their management at all. They want to significantly increase the cost of acquiring what they (right or wrong) believe to be a competing product by making said acquisition expensive in terms of bandwidth cost. What to do?

Get a large group of like-minded people together and burn a shitload of OO.org CDs. Pass them out like candy to anyone who asks for them. Send a copy to your local newspapers with an explanation of what BigPond is doing. Maybe put up a custom web site (the domain screwbigpond.org.au comes to mind) where people can sign up to have a copy of OO.org mailed to them for el cheapo.

Be creative.

Re:Storm, meet tea-cup

[idontgno]

Are you volunteering to pay for the bandwidth consumed? Are you unfamiliar with the concept of "metered" access? Did you miss the part of TFA which pointed out that once upon a time, Telstra customers could download OO.o without burning into their prepaid bandwitdth quota, but now they can't, and the reason this has happened is that Telstra feels threatened by OO.o?

Yeah, I thought so. This is /.; it's easier to whip out a quip than actually read and comment intelligently.

Now comes the part where you sidestep how thoroughly you misapprehended the situation by muttering off-topic and irrelevant criticism of metered access.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Malevolent Tester]

Blatantly off topic, but my karma's fucked anyway - these posts are one of the best adverts possible for Noscript. All that posting goes to waste if the Javascript won't start.

Re:Storm, meet tea-cup

[necro2607]

"Because it's so difficult to type http://www.openoffice.org/ into your browser."

No, the point is that the ISP previously offered OpenOffice on their servers which would not count towards users' monthly download limits. Now, they've removed it from the "free area" and users will have to take a 120+mb hit to their monthly bandwidth limit to download the software.

Frankly the whole concept of "unmetered free download areas" reeks of AOL and CompuServe, to me, but I guess it's beneficial for users with a really low and strictly-enforced monthly download limit.

Big Pond?

[MMC Monster]

I live north of the equator. Exactly how big is this ISP that they can afford to develop their own office suite? And what is the business plan behind this? Especially since it competes on one side with Microsoft Office and on the other with openoffice.org.

Re:Big Pond?

[Otter]

It seems to actually be a competitor to Google Docs, but your point is still a good one.

Re:Big Pond?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bigpond is the largest ISP in Australia by a long way. They are part of Telstra the recently privatised government owned telco that enjoyed a monopoly for decades and continues to do so as it owns almost all of the network infrastructure in the country.

Re:Big Pond?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I live north of the equator. Exactly how big is this ISP that they can afford to develop their own office suite?

They're very big, you might know them by the name Telestra. BigPond is a subsidiary and the dominant ISP in Australia. They didn't develop it, they just rebranded ThinkFree after licensing it from Haansoft.

And what is the business plan behind this? Especially since it competes on one side with Microsoft Office and on the other with openoffice.org.

Partly I think it is value added to compete with the other ISPs (they actually have some competition still). They may be selling support and addition services to the business market in the future.

Re:Big Pond?

[gringer]

They're a subsidiary of Telstra, which is the largest provider of both local and long distance telephone services, mobile services, dialup, wireless, DSL and cable internet access in Australia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstra

My guess is that they would be comparable to AT&T in terms of how they compete with other products/companies.

Then again, I'm from New Zealand, so don't have a great grasp of either AT&T or Telstra — we do have Telstra[Clear] here, but it's somewhat swamped by our Telecom/Xtra.

Re:Big Pond?

[fm6]

I doubt if even a big ISP can afford to develop its own office suite. Very likely this is a rebranded version of software that they've licensed from somebody else. It probably won't be too long until every ISP has something similar.

Re:Big Pond?

[Fex303]

Exactly how big is this ISP

It's already been answered a bunch of times - they're freakin' huge - but those answers left out one important detail. Telstra, who use the Big Pond (AKA big pwnd) brand for their ISP business, used to be the government monopoly, but have been sold off by the previous government. This has led to all sorts of craziness, since they own all of the infrastructure and have been forced to lease it to competing companies.

They've been complete pricks about the whole thing (selling bandwidth to individuals at a cheaper rate than claim that they are able to sell it to ISPs, creating crazy caps on bandwidth with massive fees for going over, deliberately holding back the rollout of ADSL 2+, etc).

They are widely despised by the Australian internet community. Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates... (I know, I must be a socialist or something, right?)

Re:Big Pond?

[bigbigbison]

BigPondOffice is a rebranded version of thinkfree.com's online office suite

Re:Big Pond?

[Mike89]

Big Pond (AKA big pwnd)

Most people I know call them "Bigpong", because they don't peer with any 'local' peering companies (mainly PIPE, but also WAIX etc), and as such you get subpar pings to gaming serves (typically IGN - hosted by Internode)

Re:Big Pond?

[SQL Error]

creating crazy caps on bandwidth with massive fees for going over

He's not kidding. We're talking $150 per gigabyte.

Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates.

In the case of Telstra, there never were any days like that.

Re:Big Pond?

[dbIII]

Another thing to add - these guys are actually so incompetant and greedy that they were hosting spyware installers via pop-up ads from their main telephone directory services web site a couple of months ago.

Re:Big Pond?

[r0b!n]

They've been complete pricks about the whole thing (selling bandwidth to individuals at a cheaper rate than claim that they are able to sell it to ISPs, creating crazy caps on bandwidth with massive fees for going over, deliberately holding back the rollout of ADSL 2+, etc).

Also Telstra ranked last in last years service and reliability awards.

This year they ranked 3rd last, not because they improved, Telstra moved up the rank because 2 other ISPs managed the difficult task of providing a worse service.

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/feature.aspx?CIaFID=4078

Re:Big Pond?

[Pop69]

So they're just the same as British Telecom here in the UK then ?

Re:Big Pond?

[Anonymous Coward]

And who runs our Australian tax farm? Why, a loony far-right American, naturally.
(not intended as a slur against sane Americans, but rather against our foul Australian-hating corporate culture here).

Re:Big Pond?

[Sergeant Pepper]

And who runs our Australian tax farm? Why, a loony far-right American, naturally. It's revenge for Rupert Murdoch. ;)

Re:Big Pond?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's revenge for Rupert Murdoch. ;)

Who at least had the good grace to explicitly renounce his Australian citizenship!

Re:Big Pond?

[Sergeant Pepper]

Who at least had the good grace to explicitly renounce his Australian citizenship! That's no consolation for us. :/

Re:Big Pond?

[james_gnz]

Telstra, who use the Big Pond (AKA big pwnd) brand for their ISP business, used to be the government monopoly, but have been sold off by the previous government. This has led to all sorts of craziness, since they own all of the infrastructure and have been forced to lease it to competing companies.

Sounds like the same thing that's happened with Telecom New Zealand. I kind of feel sorry for the owners, really -- they bought an awesome cash cow, but were then forced to provide everyone access to the udder.

They are widely despised by the Australian internet community. Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates... (I know, I must be a socialist or something, right?)

I don't think this makes you a socialist. I think socialists believe the workers should have control over the means of production (whereas capitalists believe that investors, ie those who raise the capital, should have control over the means of production). This is actually more comparable with communism -- everyone has control (well, ideally, anyway) -- except that you've stipulated only for natural monopolies, which I think makes sense.

Competition is good where it works, but it doesn't make sense to have parallel competing networks. One network is bound to become the monopoly eventually, and even if it were possible to maintain such competition, it would be more efficient to connect the networks into a cohesive network with redundancy and load-balancing. I can't imagine anyone would advocate for parallel competing state-highway systems. Other kinds of competing networks are no less ridiculous, just less visually so.

Re:Big Pond?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's no consolation for us. :/

Perhaps we could get together and send Trujillo and Murdoch both somewhere nice? Or at least somewhere else. Iraq, perhaps.

Re:Big Pond?

[Sergeant Pepper]

Perhaps we could get together and send Trujillo and Murdoch both somewhere nice? Or at least somewhere else. Iraq, perhaps. Iraq is a nice place for them. Well, at least, from my point of view. ;)

Re:Big Pond?

[HangingChad]

They are widely despised by the Australian internet community. Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates... (I know, I must be a socialist or something, right?)

When does a service become so common it is, in essence, a utility?

Re:Big Pond?

[ross.w]

Yes. They are in fact, much the same. Although you can actually get untimed local calls from them, unlike BT. Timed local calls used to really suck when depending on dialup.

Re:Big Pond?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bigpond is the ISP arm of Australia's largest Telco (once our only Telco, govertment owned and recently sold off). Now they have an American CEO to force Aussies to pay for what we used to own! We once had some of the smartest telecom engineers and technical people in the world, able to run a continent sized system with the cost of a 20 million people economy. Once sold, Telstra pensioned off the smart staff and kept the stupid and greedy ones. Now they want money and don't care about the service they were once prized for. Thus, if an opposition or free program might cost them, they try to obfuscate or blatantly lie, cheat and bully the public into believing Bigpond is right.
They are Australia's 800 kg Telco gorilla and they have the talent of a baboon!

Re:Big Pond?

[mrscorpio]

Considering the fact that they once benefitted from a government monopoly, certainly Australia must have some sort of anticompetitive laws in place?

Some sort of smackdown from the government in this area would be warranted. You're right, government mandated monopoly would be better than what you have, but a truly free market where competitors had a fair shake at it would be the best of all.

Re:Big Pond?

[jollyreaper]

They are widely despised by the Australian internet community. Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates... (I know, I must be a socialist or something, right?) Totally. A banner-waving cockfag red, yessir. Dirty hippie with bugs under your arms and flowers in your hair. And, according to my detractors, I am one as well. I have become so jaded that the very words "free market" cause my fingers to reflexively curl around imaginary necks. People tell me it's so childish to blame the Republicans. Well, they're the ones who have been in charge for the past eight years, right? But now that the Dems have gotten a measure of power (that they've since abdicated to the Republicans), they can certainly be blamed for a measure of it as well. And when they win 2008, they'll continue the anti-American policies of the Bush Administration, moving from enablers directly to abusers. There are philosophical differences between liberal and conservative at the local level but when you get up to national government, they're all weasels in the same corrupt shit house, selling us down the river for a buck. All of this free market, globalization, and deregulation shit is just Col. Sanders explaining to the chickens why deep-frying is good for them.

Re:Big Pond?

[Anonymous Coward]

uh... simple answer... TOO BIG.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Broken Toys]

They're an Internet Service Provider (ISP). They're not supposed to decide what you can or cannot download. They're only supposed to provide the means to connect to the Internet and to let you do what you will on the Internet.

The immature thing to do.

[ShagratTheTitleless]

Everyone using that ISP could set up a script to download BigPond Office over and over when their machine is idle. ;) Bah, it would probably violate their T.O.S. and lag out the network for everyone else.

Re:The immature thing to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather, the expensive thing to do.. access is *metered* for most people, per MB... which is why this move stinks for a lot of people.

Host THIS:

[UncleTogie]

Personally, I'd call 'em and ask what you're supposed to use for an office suite if their "hosted" solution is down for maintenance, or if the phone company cut one wire too many. Ask if they'd be ready to pay the salary of the average office worker that suddenly can't work.

If not, ask them to send you their copy of OO on any disk they can burn it on. ;)

Re:Host THIS:

[TeraCo]

I'm pretty sure the answers would be: "Don't care" and "No" in that order. What then?

Re:Host THIS:

[UncleTogie]

What then?

Myself, I'd go to the OpenOffice site, click here, find the nearest local source for the disk, and contact them for directions....

Re:Host THIS:

[Techman83]

Have you ever called their support number? If you can get past the 'voice recognition' (I use that term very loosely!) and survive a 30-120 minute wait on hold to be told that their is a problem at your end, guided through re-setting up your modem, finding out that putting the same settings in for the 3rd time doesn't fix the problem, then several hours later it turns out to be a routing problem at their end or they 'accidentally' unplugged your line!

I do get quite angry with their support line, it takes quite a lot to get through their monkey brains that a little adsl modem is rather simple and once the settings are correct, short of modem failure... they just fucking work! If a reboot doesn't solve the problem, it's not at my god damned end! I have gone so far as to tell my friends/family that if they choose bigpond as a provider I will not help them when their internet dies. They chose to go against my advice, they can bloody well deal with it!(It may seem harsh, but 100's of hours of my life have been wasted by that fucking useless company).

Re:Host THIS:

[Feanturi]

Ask if they'd be ready to pay the salary of the average office worker that suddenly can't work.

They might respond with: "Oh, so you're using our service for business purposes? You'll need to be "upgraded" to our business package for $200/month, here I can adjust your account right now."

Re:Host THIS:

[Kurayamino-X]

They are the phone company.

Confusing article title

[jmdc]

I came away unclear about what actually happened. Just exactly what is the unmetered file download area? Did they just decide to stop being a mirror for openoffice? Are they doing something more malicious? If all that was done was some company stopped mirroring an open source project because they are launching a competitor, I fail to see what is remotely surprising about that.

Re:Confusing article title

[ozzee]

Just exactly what is the unmetered file download area?...

Bandwidth caps in Australia are on every ADSL plan. This is usually because the bandwidth costs to the ISP are quite heavy compared to the USA. Most content comes from the US (google, youtube, yahoo etc) and so Telstra (owner of Bigpond) gets to set monopoly prices. To make the bandwidth cap a little more palatable, many (most) ISP's mirror content or large files on servers on their networks so there is no impact on their running costs. In a competitive move, Telstra/Bigpond have done the same thing.

Why Telstra thinks that removing OO from their unmetered server is going to gain them any kudos is a mystery. However, if you put on your monopoly management hat, you can see why. In this case I'd say it's purely evil (tm) as the competitive advantage of not having OO downloadable is next to nothing.

Re:Confusing article title

[Hucko]

Bandwidth caps in Australia are on every ADSL plan. This is usually because the bandwidth costs to the ISP

Not every plan, but most. I personally am on an unlimited (AUD$50) plan.

Re:Confusing article title

[ozzee]

Which plan ?

Re:Confusing article title

[Hucko]

supernerd.com.au

Hmmm... it seems they have changed the plans. grrr.... .

Re:Confusing article title

[Hucko]

http://supernerd.com.au/broadband/index.cfm. sorry, got upset that they had changed the plans. Now I have to check out what happens when my plan runs out.

Re:Confusing article title

[zippthorne]

On the other hand, the "unmetered download area" is a kind of support that they generously do out of the goodness of their hearts. Or for some other reason, the point is that by having OO.org downloads there, they're expending resources to make it easier for their customers to download it.

Enter the competing product. Does it really make sense to put effort into making your competitors products easier to get? If they didn't already have OO.org in the d/l area, They certainly wouldn't be well advised to add it, so what's the big deal about them discontinuing their support of a competing product? It's not like they've banned downloads directly from OO.org themselves.

Re:Confusing article title

[lachlan76]

In the past (don't know about now; I'm on Internode), WestNet did a 512k unmetered plan. I'm not sure if it's still available now.

Don't be evil

[Bearhouse]

This will be news when Google search no longer returns OO results. Kinda dumb, since online apps are not going to replace offlne ones anytime soon IMHO. Surely much better to encourage their use, (if you're trying to sell such concepts/services) by 1. making better bridges between online & offline docs. 2. building trust by not acting stupidly.

I'm really going to trust my data with asshats like this?

and don't forget cover CDs

[nozzo]

If you really don't want to download it then it's on the coverdisk of some magazines, in the UK it's in PC Pro for example with updated versions each month.
It does seem small minded of the ISP to behave this way - but hardly the end of the world.

own little ecosystem

[nurb432]

In some areas, they do have one as you really dont have any practical alternatives other then disconnecting.

Re:own little ecosystem

[digitalchinky]

What are Australian schools churning out these days, it's than, not then.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[AvitarX]

Well I guess it's their job to mirror the Open Office website then.

It really is kind of lame of them, but it is perfectly understandable, and if there is a huge problem someone should open up a mirror in Australia, and put some adds up.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and in return you pay them for the privilege. BigPond customers can do just that: they can download OpenOffice.org from openoffice.org, and the bandwidth they use will come out of the bandwidth allowance they've paid for. This is perfectly reasonable.

All that's happened is that BigPond have stopped offering a special download that didn't come out of the bandwidth allowance. They aren't stopping people downloading OOo who want to download OOo, they just aren't giving people who want OOo special treatment any more. They are being more net neutral, not less. What exactly is wrong with this?

Try dealing with Bigpond billing

[syousef]

Earlier this year (several months ago) they switched billing systems. You'd think this is a good thing as their previous billing system was a bit of a joke. (For a long time the only ways you could pay was via credit card or by walking into a telstra shop or post office. After years of this they added BPAY but not automatic payment).

- The new billing system still does not recognise certain discounts. I've called repeatedly about this and been promised they will be applied retrospectively once the billing system is fixed, but that they can't give an ETA. I don't know if I'll ever see that money, and I'm considering switching to a different ISP. (The only reason I'm hesitant is that I'm on cable and other ISPs would be ADSL. If my phone lines aren't niece in addition to setup costs I have to worry about an ADSL filter etc.)

- The new billing system allows for automatic payment. The old system did not. What they fail to explain to you when they tell you this is that if you apply for automatic payment, you will no longer receive paper bills. What's worse it's not even possible on their new system to have both paper bills and automatic payment. Email's nice but it's still difficult for some employers to accept an emailed bill if they're paying a portion of your Internet bill as part of your entitlements. (Fortunately it's not been as big a problem with my employer as I thought it would be).

- When I made a formal complaint through superviser, I was put on hold on and off for about an hour then told that the system was running slow and that I'd be called back to confirm the complaint had been put in. I provided my mobile number, which they did call just the once but since I didn't answer it they didn't bother to call or email again.

Bigpond has always been a pig of a company to deal with and they're only getting worse.

Re:Try dealing with Bigpond billing

[Anonymous Coward]

It always amazes me that people sign up with these pricks.

They are huge, but they are a classic monopoly behaving badly. They own most of the last mile in Australia, and play games with it to their benefit and users and competitors cost. We cannot get naked DSL here for one, we must buy a phone service to put the DSL on.

Gatekeeper behavior at it's best. They've had the ear of government, and they've staked out their turf. You need lots of cash to challenge them.

Friends don't let Friends do BigPong.

Re:Try dealing with Bigpond billing

[Aj]

Try Dealing with BigPong and Tel$tra to get DSL in adelaide...

I just bought a house, where the previous owner had ADSL (bigpond service) which worked fine for them for over 2 years.

They disconnected the day they moved out, and I "ordered" my DSL the day after.

I was given the same physical pairs, and was told....

wait for it....

"Sorry, your phone line is incapable of supporting DSL"

So, I said "How do you explain that the previous tennant had DSL"

and the answer was....

again....

wait for it....

"Sorry, your phone line is incapable of supporting DSL and your line has been flagged as "*never* getting DSL"

I asked for an internal dispute to be raised within tel$tra, and they came back with the answer (you will never guess what it is)......

"Sorry, your phone line is incapable of supporting DSL"

So then I asked "How did the guy before me have it" and they said....

"Sorry, your phone line is incapable of supporting DSL"

I went to the TIO (Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (ie tel$tra's Bitch)) and asked them to fight it for me, as you know, they are supposed to be here for us, the consumer..

their answer?

You will never guess...

oh ok, you got me....

"Sorry, your phone line is incapable of supporting DSL"

No one will tell me how it is that the previous tennant had it, and I am just pissed off with it all now.....

Re:Try dealing with Bigpond billing

[deniable]

Wow, they usually pull that here if you're trying to connect to another provider. The solution is get BigPong DSL for the absolute minimum period and churn to the other mob. DSL is so much easier to connect if you're signing up for BigPong. Obviously not in your case.

Re:Try dealing with Bigpond billing

[MichaelSmith]

I once had an optus mobile and a telstra landline. I diverted calls from the landline to the mobile but telstra only charged me in 25c units so I didn't know if enabling and disabling the diversion cost me money. I called telstra and they said they would have to call the exchange. Five minutes later they came back with the reply" we are unable to answer your request because you have selected optus for long distance calls.

In other words piss off. We don't want your business.

My mother in law changed her land line over to optus and she had less than a dollar owing on her telstra bill. Every time the bill came in she called telstra to pay it only to be told that they only accept payments of more than a dollar. Years later she is still getting that bill.

Also: do you remember this?

Re:Try dealing with Bigpond billing

[syousef]

I'd say write to your Member of Parliament, but I suspect you'll get the same answer there too.

Re:Try dealing with Bigpond billing

[donak]

I had issues with billing for mobile and landline services, but not with my Bigpond ISP account.
I spent huge amounts of time attempting to resolve the issues, up to the point where I spent 2 1/2 hours talking on the phone one day, with my wife in attendance, because:

[1] Mobile and Telephone were in her name, and although she had added my name numerous times as authorised to act on "her account", every time I phoned up with an issue, I was told I was not authorised.

[2] ISP/Internet account was in my name ... ditto for my wife being "not authorised" in spite of numerous authorisations.

The amounts that various people said we would be rebated, because of problems, promises by sales people that were not fulfilled, etc. were always reversed on the next bill. In other words, no matter who you spoke to, they did not have authority.

I ended up paying out about $600 Australian, to close all accounts, payout my wife's mobile (cell) phone contract, and we are now happily paying two thirds of what we were paying to Optus, one of Telstra's competitors.
And I still have steam coming out of my ears!

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Lunzo]

I would say the metering makes this a problem, but Telstra broadband isn't aimed at nerds. It's aimed at the average person who, let's face it, probably hasn't heard of open office.

We can see that Telstra is aimed at the average Aussie by examining what they offer in the way of broadband. Their plans are as a rule more expensive than what the competition offers (not sure how that works considering they are the wholesaler as well as a consumer ISP) and often come with hefty "hidden" charges (usually $0.15 per Mb referece) for going over miniscule download limits. The reason they get away with this is slick marketing and plenty of muscle politically from previously being the government monopoly telco in Australia. Many normal people think Telstra BigPond IS broadband, and don't know about other ISPs.

In contrast, nerds are aware that there are many ISPs in Australia (well at least in the capital cities) and can research plans on sites such as http://whirlpool.net.au/. The nerds, who would be likely to download open office, would generally be on better plans with other ISPs where the size of the open office download isn't going to be an issue.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[stoolpigeon]

didn't read TFA did ya? If you did - but still hold that opinion, I'm flying to Hungary next month and first class seats were way out of my budget. Can you mail me $2400 dollars so I don't have to ride back in coach? It'd be the right thing to do.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[bhtooefr]

Actually, not true, because now they're giving special treatment to users of their own service.

Slightly less net neutral than before.

Telstra BigPond's usage meter rates...

[Radon360]

...are available here.

Looks like plans capped at anywhere from 200MB to 60GB per month, with a $0.15/MB (AUD, not USD) overage charge on some plans. On one plan (Liberty plan), they severely throttle your bandwidth once you hit the limit.

Re:Telstra BigPond's usage meter rates...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I'm on a 20GB 'Liberty' plan and half the month I'm stuck on dialup speeds (~64k). Beats the hell out of paying 15c/MB though. There are many other ISPs around with much better deals, I'm just stuck on a cable modem and they're the only providers.

Re:Telstra BigPond's usage meter rates...

[nurb432]

If i had metered use again, id rather have the throttled version, at least i wouldnt get hit with some stupid charge i wasnt expecting due to the tons of spam i get each month or a out of the blue DDoS attack..

I wonder what the ACCC would say

[syousef]

It seems to me that this is anti-competitive. That's exactly the sort of thing the Australian Competetion and Consumer Commission (ACCC) should look into. The problem tends to be that the ACCC seems to be a very political organisation.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Anonymous Coward]

except, dude, your link is broken.

It's not news... (was Re:Why is this news ?)

[Laebshade]

It's not news, it's Fark.

Oh, wait.

Metered-Unmetered

[emjoi_gently]

One thing to note is that Australian net users, and especially customers of Bigpond, have fairly tight, stingy, download quotas. This means that the unmetered archives becomes important when you want to download the large stuff. Having said that, just how often do you download a fresh copy of OOO anyway?

Re:Metered-Unmetered

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a bit of a generalisation, I have quite generous download quotas. But that's because I'm lucky enough to be in an area where I can get a connection not tied to Telstra's network...

Re:Metered-Unmetered

[emjoi_gently]

Well, if you have a good quota then it's probably because you pay for it.
Probably more than the typical household wants to pay. But then the typical household isn't going to download OOO either.

It's all a rather abstract issue that doesn't really matter much.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Anonymous Coward]

>> We can see that Telstra is aimed at the average Aussie

So, in other words, the average Aussie is a complete and utter idiot?

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[stoolpigeon]

My point, that apparently didn't get across, is that I will get less because I'm paying less. This guy has opted for a plan that restricts the amount he can download or he has to pay more. The ISP used to host OpenOffice and allow users to download it without it counting against the cap. Now they don't. He can still go download it - but it may force him to end up paying more for his internet access. And I don't see why that is the ISPs problem. Just like I don't blame Delta that I will have less room on my flight - unless somebody decides to upgrade my ticket for me. I figured if you wanted this persons ISP to upgrade his account for free, you might want to upgrade my flight.

How much does 100MB cost?

[davidwr]

How much would it cost someone to buy 100MB of bandwidth?

Are we talking 10 cents, a buck, $10, or $100?

If it's 10 cents quitchurbitchin. If it's $10, which it very well might be if you are pushing your quota limit and must go to the next-highest rate plan, then you have a legitimate gripe and should probably just buy a CD. If it's $100 well folks, we've got a serious problem.

By the way, are the Australian environmentalists up in arms over how this may encourage waste by encouraging people to buy CDs rather than download it?

Re:How much does 100MB cost?

[Tony Hoyle]

$0.15/mb

So 100mb is $15.

Re:How much does 100MB cost?

[Lost Engineer]

Damn at that rate it's not even worth pirating movies. Maybe that's their evil plan...

Re:How much does 100MB cost?

[robbak]

It's worse than that on their 3G wireless: Depending on how much you pay, it's between 1.5 and .5 cents per Kilobyte. $15,000 / Mb For the Loss. Oh, my latest bill just recommended that I connect my phone to my notebook as a modem. Just in time for Windows to update to IE7, with my luck!

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[palegray.net]

The truth is even funnier. In the linked article, clicking on the link to "BigPond Office" takes you to docs.google.com. Wow. Wonder if the author intended to link to this site instead...

Re:Still Available

[Bryansix]

tinyurl is lame. You can use HTML tags. Learn how to make a hyperlink of text. It's way easier.

Not surprised

[EdIII]

I am not surprised at all. I think that people today take the Internet and ISP's for granted. I am sure there are a lot of people complaining and crying foul.

What people need to remember is that for-profit companies make up nearly the ENTIRE infrastructure of the Internet. I am not even aware of the percentage and makeup of the non-profit Internet anyways.

When the Internet started gaining popularity ISP's did treat their customers like caged in little wallets with fluffy ears. AOL is the best example and still around. A person is not entitled to a "free" Internet. It is not a right granted by any government that I know of. It's not in the US bill of rights, no amendment has been made either.

It is the same confusion regarding automobiles. No one has an actual right to drive. It is a privilege extended by the community, city, state, government, etc. Every US citizen has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Though, not at the expense of others. Automobiles are inherently dangerous and should be controlled in their use.

Unless an ISP specifically grants by contract a "free" Internet void of any content management, filtering, restrictions, etc, the customer has no recourse legally. The whole reason I chose an ISP other then AOL all those years ago was specifically a "free" Internet.

The fact that an ISP has a competing product and is trying to eliminate access to their competition through their network makes perfect sense to me. I don't like it. I don't expect their customers to like it, but it is not inherently wrong to do so.

The only reason more ISP's are not doing so is simply that not too many of them actually have products in competition and most would and should be afraid of the backlash.

Eventually government controls of some kind are going to have to be setup or this could spread much further. Imagine if a behemoth of a company acquired an ISP and made sure that it's customers could access the competition?

I think Big Pond has started the ball rolling on what is likely going to be a very heated and passionate debate about just what is and should be our rights accessing the Internet, especially since the Internet has now become as important if not more then owning a car.

Re:Not surprised

[Hucko]

Telstra is currently a government supported monopoly. They report huge profits then excuse them that they can't afford to provide a suitable service to rural Australians because it would be too expensive. The status quo continues. (They monopoly is being broken, just very slowly.)

Re:Not surprised

[EdIII]

That makes it a problem. When a for-profit company engages in monopolistic practices that supress the competition, that's when government regulation has to step in.

I don't think that right now ISP's have to deliver "free" unrestricted internet to their customers by law, but when you don't have any choice of ISP provider then it makes them an instant monopoly.

If Big Pond has no competition at all, then they should tread lightly. Attempting to supress their competition through their own product would be unwise.

It seems the Australian government should get involved and make that market a little more competetive, or make laws that insure that every Australian citizen has free and unrestricted access to other networks through Big Pond.

so to be completely neutral they should charge?

[davidwr]

I guess if they didn't have a competing product and eliminated their free download area entirely you'd be happy?

Hmm, come to think of it, that is the fairest solution.

Re:so to be completely neutral they should charge?

[networkBoy]

FWIW:

Deakin University http://www.deakin.edu.au/
Newcastle University http://www.newcastle.edu.au/

3 Downloads for these sites will not attract usage charges for BigPond Members - Please be sure to check that data accessed is from the featured University sites and is not from a linked 3rd party site. So one of these to universities should have a copy available for download. Also, if you proxy through them likely you could bypass the meter all together. Just get a mirror repository to be hosted by one of the unis for sourceforge and you will be good to go.
-nB

Re:so to be completely neutral they should charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

mirror.aarnet.edu.au is hosted by anu

Why stop there?

[kramulous]

I wish my ISP would stop all the .doc, .xls and .ppt files that come through. My world would be a smiler, happier place filled with rainbows and dew drops on kitten whiskers.

Telstra Bigpond Office

[Hucko]

Yeah, it isn't nice that they stopped unmetered downloads of OO.o, but it is their right. But what the hell is Telstra doing offering an office suite for? What the! They can't even organise their communication services properly! And that is their core business!

Having just checked it out, Google Documents is its competitor, not OO.o; a technicality admittedly. Telstra will gyp you somehow (probably on the download/upload). Please have some common sense and not use this! If you thought Microsoft was bad, Telstra is exponentially worse! They just don't affect as many people.

Their blurb reads "

BigPond® Office lets you create, edit and share word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents from anywhere you can use the Internet, any time. Simply login and start working. BigPond Office is BigPond's alternative office suite. And best of all, it's all free* for most BigPond members.

* Use of BigPond Office is unmetered for most BigPond Broadband Members. Download/browsing charges may apply for other customers

Has anyone else ever heard of it previously? I'm an Australian and I certainly haven't. If you are an Australian and still with Telstra, do yourself a favour and check out the competition. I'm with Supernerd for $50 a month unlimited. Very happy. (It is a bit slow at 512bps, but I can't afford anything better.)

Re:Telstra Bigpond Office

[Lost_In_Specs]

(It is a bit slow at 512bps, but I can't afford anything better.) Dear God, let that be a typo...

Re:Telstra Bigpond Office

[Hucko]

heh, yeah. I forgot the k...

Also...

[Spy der Mann]

the fix for this is not a big deal - it fit in the subject field of this post.

I have an easier to remember url for that :)

Bunch of Kangaroos!

[n2art2]

What a bunch of kangaroos!

Re:Bunch of Kangaroos!

[dbIII]

What a bunch of kangaroos!

Their upper levels of management are now exclusively from the USA in the odd half privatised government telco with no government control that is Telstra. The locals are actually refered to as "savages" by some managers. There is a certain type of US manager that goes wild overseas and needs to be chained to a personal lawyer 24/7 to stop them doing stupid and illegal business practices. Some of the latest gems that were implemented is making employees wear voice recorders all day at work (illegal to record the customers they talked to and recorded without consent without a warrant) to be reviewed by management later - credit card numbers and all. There was also the incident of firing a woman on the grounds of morality for activites outside work hours (illegal), and not firing the two men she was with - a little bit of Taliban mixed with a desire to own employees like slaves in that managers head.

Don't take this as an anti-US rant - the entire country is not made up of executives that act like Banditos.

Re:Bunch of Kangaroos!

[dbIII]

A rambling above - to clarify, it is illegal in Australia to fire people for things that have nothing at all to do with work and occur outside of work hours (eg. illegal to fire somebody if they are found to be gay). The emotive Taliban bit above refers to people that make moral judgements on women, punish them and give the men a free reign. In the situation above a laison occured after a belated Christmas party (in March with typical Telstra disorganisation) and not at work or the work party but management really did think it owned the employees spare time and did have the right to punish them.

There are hundreds of Telstra stories, like the one where they were storing backup tapes in large wheeled rubbish bins and the obvious happened losing more than six months of backups from three government departments. They own most of the communications infrastructure so they still have to be dealt with.

Re:Bunch of Kangaroos!

[deniable]

You forgot 68% of shareholders saying no to a big bonus package. The board said "screw you, we're getting it anyway."

There's GPS tracking of technicians, suicides among call-center workers, and the public poll that said the Wiggles have more trust than the Telstra board.

Re:Bunch of Kangaroos!

[cliffski]

holy fuck. don't you people have a government who can prosecute this kind of thing? Seriously. If its as bad as posters here depict, some senior executives should spend the next 30 years breaking rocks. That would be my verdict anyway.

Re:Bunch of Kangaroos!

[dbIII]

The problem is the government was busy trying to offload the thing for ideological reasons so taking any sort of control was seen as being an admission of failure. The government changed a couple of weeks ago but it still looks like the worst they could do to these guys is deportation. What is most likely is some sort of expensive bribe to get them out early and dismantling the rather stupid situation where the government owns just under half of the Telco but has less say than the smallest shareholder - but that will take time. There really is no chance that the monopoly will be broken.

What's up with these people?

[Frosty Piss]

Metered bandwidth for consumer accounts is a pretty sad concept in today's market. In any part of the world.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Znork]

"The ISP in question meters its users' usage"

Say, about that, how do they diffrentiate between solicited and unsolicited traffic? I mean, if I decided to send a whole bunch of packets to some poor Telstra subscriber, would they actually be charged for those packets? Or is their entire network firewalled and inaccessible from the outside world?

The very idea that anyone on the internet could decide the size of your next bill would make a metered ISP a very dubious proposition imo.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[WilliamTS99]

Bigpond decided to stop subsidizing the cost of distributing OpenOffice.org. I don't see the problem here. If you don't like it, change your plan to un-metered, change your ISP, or go to the library with your USB memory stick.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Gideon Fubar]

Yeah, the GP got it wrong. Previously BigPond were a mirror, and would allow unmetered downloads (that's right, Australia's largest ISP provides only metered plans.. although they used to have some that were called unlimited, until our equivalent of the FCC told them to stop it.) for their own customers.

I admit, it still doesn't seem like much, but Telstra/BigPond's cheapest and most heavily advertised ADSL2+ product has only 200mb of prepaid bandwidth, with excess @ 15c/Mb and it has a lockin contract.

The ~120mb OOo download will now take up the majority of an uneducated customer's monthly uncharged bandwidth.

Yes, there are much better ISPs in Australia, but many people still unfortunately use BigPond, mostly for bad reasons.

$150/GB? Dang that's expensive

[davidwr]

From referece [sic]:

Additional usage charged at $0.15/MB, except for members on the BigPond Liberty plans. If you are on a BigPond Liberty plan, once you reach your usage allowance, the speed of your service will slow to 64kbps. I'm all in favor of metered bandwidth but it should reflect cost. I'm sorry but I just don't see a customer downloading 1GB above the quota costing the provider $150 a month. At the DSL2 speeds of 20Mbps, you can hit 1GB in less than 7 minutes.

Well, at least they ahve the Liberty plan that just throttles you to dialup speeds after less than a 14 hours per month of full-throttle downloading.

Is there any justification for these high marginal per-GB fees?

WTF is wrong with Australia?

[realmolo]

Seriously. They seem to be the MOST "anti-consumer-rights" of the so-called "Western" countries. It's just bizarre. Is Australia really a police state? Because that's what it seems like, honestly.

Re:WTF is wrong with Australia?

[Vegeta99]

Well, prison state, any way =)

Re:WTF is wrong with Australia?

[ozzee]

Seriously. They seem to be the MOST "anti-consumer-rights" of the so-called "Western" countries. It's just bizarre. Is Australia really a police state? Because that's what it seems like, honestly.

There are a number of factors. Firstly, the population in OZ is about 1/10th that of the US. This means that the market is smaller and the competitive pressures you find in the US are just not as profound in OZ. The telecom supplier in OZ (telstra) is a government created monopoly. The regulations under which Telstra (which owns Bigpond) operate are truly detrimental. No competitor will ever be able to make a dent into Telstra's monopoly unless the government fixes the regulations.

If I was paranoid, I'd say that the Telstra privatization was an example of the government being led by the benefits of the corps rather that the benefits to the people and hence probably corrupt. This is why Australian's who know what's going on are a little touchy with things like removing OO from the "unmetered downloads".

However, the government being 0wn3d by the corps is a title I give to the USA. Medical insurance, medicare prescription plans, ecent FCC decisions, electronic voting machines, Microsoft being let off etc are all pretty nasty examples of the corps taking over the government.

Australia just changed their govenment as will the USA next November. There is some hope that the corps will loose a little control on both changes but the proverbial jury is still out.

Comparing Australia to the USA on this metric doesn't say much I suppose !

Re:WTF is wrong with Australia?

[Anonymous Coward]

same thing here in Germany with the German Telekom... Exactly the same story. Privatized state corporations suck.

Re:WTF is wrong with Australia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give us time, we just threw out the man who fux0red up this country for 11 years (Bush's poodle). Gives us a few years and hopefully things will return to normal somewhat. We are sorry for the problems we have caused or been a part of but we are sort of like america, too many dumb people...

Re:WTF is wrong with Australia?

[GaryPatterson]

Sadly the Telstra privatisation was bungled from start to finish. As soon as 51% of the shares left the government, the board they appointed turned around and flicked the finger to the government. They feel that as a private company they should have no obligation to the government beyond those defined by laws. They had a very hostile relationship with a government that privatised them but still expected them to toe a policy line.

Which would be fine if they were not created with tax dollars. Even that would be acceptable at some level if they didn't own the entire damned network as well!

The government, driven by a privatisation ideology, effectively [i]gave away the entire taxpayer funded network to a private company[/i].

Optus are laying a few cables here and there, but the network is effectively Telstra's. The ISPs and other telecom companies pay Telstra, or customers can choose Telstra directly and pay more (oddly they're rarely competitive).

I'd have been thrilled to see the government keep the network and privatise the company. That'd ensure a level playing field. Or privatise the network as a seperate company unrelated to Telstra. That'd fit with their "government stays out of business" mantra, despite the 10 billion dollars Telstra was giving back in profits each year. Either option would have provided real competition in the industry.

Sadly the bozos who ran the Communications Ministry just didn't think any of this would happen. After years of literally retarded IT policy under Richard Alston (well known for a while as the world's biggest luddite), we suffered years of utter inability under Helen Coonan (who drove the privatisation, brilliantly relaxed media ownership to encourage diversity but resulted in less, and recently introduced an Internet filtering app paid for with $80M in tax dollars that was completely hacked in 30 mins by a high school kid). Under the new Labor government, anyone put in the role would be better. I'd argue that random choices made by a die throw or Magic 8-Ball would have given us a better communications industry than we've got now. Surely no-one could do any worse.

Re:WTF is wrong with Australia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, a company charging you for a service you use instead of providing it free like they used to, that's a police state?

Re:WTF is wrong with Australia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia has been dominated by big business for a long time. I moved to Australia from the UK about 8 years ago, and couldn't believe how bad (and essentially unregulated) the banks and the telcos are. Unfortunately, people in Australia simply don't know any better and allow it to happen. It's a great country in many regards, but it is so skewed towards the rich being rich (and getting richer), it isn't funny...

Re:WTF is wrong with Australia?

[deniable]

We threw one out and are getting more of the same. I saw the new guy start backing away from greenhouse targets last week. Give it six months and he'll be Telstra's bitch just like the last guy.

Re:WTF is wrong with Australia?

[MichaelSmith]

A lot of current and ex telstra technical people I know are the "living in the parents basement" sorts. I think removing the monopoly (and particularly taking away OTC) was a bit like mother kicking the 40 year old out of the house for good.

Its our fault we did it, you know. We should never have turned our backs on the company which gave us 2400 baud modems and push button telephones. And we are paying for it now. You just see, when those amateurs at singtel realise they don't know how to solder up an MDF they will all come back and everything will be forgiven.

Eventually

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[enoz]

To put in perspective the entry level plans have measly bandwidth quotas from 200mb to 600mb per month. Then to add further insult to injury any additional usage is charged at $150 per GB.

However don't think all Aussie internet is as bad as this, there are many competing ISPs so you would have to be a complete idiot to sign up to Bigpoo.

Are there alternatives?

[davidwr]

Are cable, satellite, microwave, WiMAX, cellular, or other media viable options for decent-speed Internet?

Re:Are there alternatives?

[williamgrant]

There are two cable providers. Telstra is one of them, and Optus' service isn't a whole lot better. Nothing else is particularly viable, as far as I know.

Re:Are there alternatives?

[Tony Hoyle]

OTOH you did get ADSL2 pretty much before anyone else and have SDSL at stupidly cheap prices (I'm green with envy my boss gets a 2mb SDSL line for less than I pay for my ADSL one in the UK.. and for me to get SDSL I'd be looking at £300/month).

Re:Are there alternatives?

[deniable]

Are cable, satellite, microwave, WiMAX, cellular, or other media viable options for decent-speed Internet?

Cable: What cable? We're getting cable rolled out here in March. At least that's what they said in 1999. The providers were hell bent on rolling out cable and did a lot of places, then stopped. I'm now in an inner suburb and have to use satellite for pay TV.

Satellite: The folks have two-way satellite with Big-Pong. 500 MB/month limit and $0.15/MB after that. It's about the only option where they are. They had dial-up before but couldn't get more than about 14k.

Others: Most of the back-bone here is run by a small group of companies. Wholesale pricing doesn't help make anything cheaper. These may help with connectivity, but not much else.

Re:Storm, meet tea-cup

[Nazlfrag]

I guess it's beneficial for users with a really low and strictly-enforced monthly download limit. Which unfortunately describes every Bigpond user out there. They have a choice between metred @ 15c/MB or shaping down to 64k once they hit the quota associated with their monthly bill. Luckily there are hundreds of other ISPs around, but the concept of unlimited internet is nonexistent thanks to Telstra owning most of the infrastructure from the last mile copper to the overseas cables. They are abusive monopolists, and when they make decisions like this can be as callous and petty as they like.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[ShieldW0lf]

It's all well and good to talk about how they shouldn't be forced to subsidize their competition, but the fact is, they own all the lines, cable and telephone. They're a monopoly who are obligated to share their lines with other ISPs to create the illusion of a free market. The competition between cable and ADSL never happened there, and Australians get gouged fiercely because of it. There are no reasonably priced all you can eat plans there.

Telstra are truly horrific to deal with. They cap your bandwidth at a ridiculously low level, then force you to pay through the nose. The justification being that they have to pay for the bandwidth they use to connect to other ISPs. Telstra are supposed to provide a place for very popular files to be hosted so people won't go outside the Australian subnet and incur more operational costs.

What they are doing here is using their monopoly control as an ISP to make alternatives to their ASP offering more expensive. Telstra customers should expect their provider to take steps to cut costs by local mirroring and make service better. This doesn't just hurt the person downloading, it hurts the internet connection for all of Australia, because everyone is with Telstra, and now they're going to be shipping OpenOffice back and forth across the fiber lines that support the continent, repeatedly and needlessly.

Scummy.

Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[Anonymous Coward]

...shortly after they took away all Australian citizens right to own firearms in 1997, incidently about the same time the Internet began to rise in great popularity and common use by ordinary folk.

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[Oscar_Wilde]

shortly after they took away all Australian citizens right to own firearms in 1997
 
Pardon?
 
Australians can own and use guns just not automatics, semi-automatics or handguns in most cases. They also need to be licensed but anyone with even half a brain and an understanding of gun safety can get a license. The last big tightening of gun laws came after 35 people were killed at the Port Arthur Massacre.

I'm a shooter and I like the Australian gun control laws. I feel much safer about people with guns here than I do when I'm in the U.S.A. There is the odd looney shooting people but not many. Australia's firearm related deaths are 2.94 per 100k people and 2.35 are suicides. For quick comparison, the US rate is 15.22 with 7.35 of those being suicides. There is of course more to these figures than just gun control but it certainly helps.

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[Lost Engineer]

just not automatics, semi-automatics or handguns in most cases Which leave you what, muzzle loading muskets? They've taken away anything with which you can reasonably defend yourself from criminals, let alone the government.

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and the recent spate of gun related killings in the USA certainly is a testament to the benefits of slack gun control.

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[sapphire wyvern]

Shotguns and bolt-action rifles are the most common.

You know, the sort of firearms that farmers and so on need as tools, as opposed to the sort of firearms that are used to kill people.

It's extremely rare for criminals to use firearms of any kind in Australia, since use of a firearm in commission of a crime dramatically escalates the legal stakes in terms of punishment. In the last couple of years, though, there have been a series of gangland shootings in Melbourne - there was basically a low-level war between some of the organised crime families. Those are the only shootings by criminals I've really been aware of lately, and since they were shooting each other the degree to which I care is pretty limited.

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[deniable]

What right? Some of the states already had tight gun laws. They only took military grade weapons away from yahoos who didn't have a demonstrated need. I'm from the country and going to a city school in the late '70s, I was the only person who'd ever handled a rifle.

That being said, if you need one to do a job (farmer, professional shooter) or you join a gun club, you can have access to a lot of stuff.

As for needing weapons to deal with the government, how well does it work when they lay siege to your house?

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[Lost Engineer]

Perhaps gun control works better on an island. Can't even keep the felons away from the guns they did ban over here. I need a permit to keep a small handgun for protection (the bad guys do have guns here) but every 2 bit gangster wannabe has an Uzi). I blame the porous Mexican border for that supply. Down there, private security have full automatics.

Also, I read on wikipedia that Australia banned pump shotguns, save for certain classes of people that don't include farmers. Those are commonly kept on farms that I've been to, as well as in hunting situations (although you are limited to 3 rounds when hunting, for the animals sake.)

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[dbcad7]

Not bringing this up as an argument against owning guns, I could care less.. that's up to whoever wants one.. But, the whole "protection" reasoning just doesn't seem to fly very well with me.

I have never had an instance in my life, or those I've known, where a gun has or would have protected them. The closest story is an attempted break-in where shouting to the person that they had a gun and were calling the cops caused the person to forget about it and flee... (in that case they didn't even have a gun)

I think most instances where having a gun would actually help someone, they are caught off guard and surprised and don't have it at hand anyway.

Just my 2 cents, your mileage may vary.

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[Oscar_Wilde]

Which leave you what, muzzle loading muskets?

Shotguns and bolt-action rifles, as the other poster said. You can get a licence for other types of firearms if you can show a need. There are some categories of firearms though which almost always require you to be in the military.

They've taken away anything with which you can reasonably defend yourself from criminals, let alone the government.
 
You don't need to defend yourself with a gun; like I said, there's hardly a criminal that owns a firearm, let alone a prohibited firearm. Those that do own one rarely use them on anyone other than fellow criminals. When I'm in the U.S.A. I'm more worried about about being shot by some hot-headed drunken idiot with a handgun than by a criminal.

As for defence against the government, I'm not buying it. Warfare has changed too much. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with a semi-automatic when the the RAAF would most probably be the ones attacking me.

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[Anonymous Coward]

nope pump action shot guns are not banned, I am licensed and have one. what was banned is self loading or semi automatic shot guns, you are limited to standard magazine size of the gun in most cases (so no ordering modified magazines with larger sizes, really it isn't an issue). 3-5 for a shotty. my 308 takes 5, my 22 takes 9, my 243 takes 6 from memory (have not used in a while), all perfectly legal.

both myself and brother are shooters, my brother actually has a higher class license than me and can have semi automatic. The gun laws were an excellent thing in this country and it is a shame that people are so scared of there own government in the US that a similar thing can't be done there. you see far more roberies in Australia now where the most lethal thing they have is a knife or a needle (still not pleasant, but far less destructive in the hands of a moron).

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[Lost Engineer]

With respect to the government of America, I have a reasonable fear of it. I'm not about to start an armed resistance, but I think the right to bear arms is fundamental to liberty. Gun control has been enacted here, but it is not as far reaching or as effective.

One thing Wikipedia was unclear on is who can get these licences in Australia. In California, needing a licence is sort of code for you can't have one unless you're a cop, depending on your county. For instance, in San Francisco, you're out of luck even if you are a cop. Your service weapons are yours, but good luck getting anything else approved. I realize that's a bit me-centric, but I'm sure other people would like to know more about who can get licences and how. You might add to that article your knowledge of the subject.

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[Anonymous Coward]

What criminals? We're talking about Australia here, not the USA.

Re:Yep... and it began the slide into despotism...

[AMuse]

I don't know which country you're in, but I have to point out that the bluff of calling out "I've got a gun and will use it" is probably more effective in countries/states where it's believable. So, in that case the fact that it's *likely to be true* is what protected the person, not the bluff itself.

In other words, if that person lived in a country where no one but criminals are permitted to own a weapon, the criminal may very well have decided to call their bluff instead of fleeing.

>> "shouting to the person that they had a gun and were calling the cops caused the person to forget about it and flee... (in that case they didn't even have a gun)"

The problem is one of cost not metering

[davidwr]

If they were charging what it really costs - or would cost if they were efficient - per extra MB then it wouldn't be a big deal. For their "fast" 0.256Mb/sec non-Liberty plan they charge AUS$30 for a 200MB cap and $40 for a 400MB cap, which works out to $50/GB. That's ridiculously high. It gets worse: Their over-the-limit fee is $150/GB. Fortunately that's in 0.001GB increments.

On their "liberty" plans, which just throttle you down when you hit the cap, their prices for "faster" 1.5Mb/sec are $80 for a 25GB cap and $70 for a 12GB cap, or $10 for 13GB. At AUS$0.77/GB that's a much more reasonable marginal cost.

American ISPs thinking about switching to metering take note: That's about US$0.66/GB. For a 1.5Mb/sec DSL user, that works out to be $0.66 for 100 minutes of downloading.

US$0.66/GB with a US$15 monthly minimum is probably fair for "home users" who don't run 24/7 full-throttle operations. I'm thinking people who run up to 10% round-the-clock utilization. For those running 24/7 utilization, the US$2500 phone bill is simply too high for that bit rate. In much of America you can get a T1 for much less.

Re:Still Available

[maxwell demon]

Without tinyurl, it would have been less hidden that the link target isn't in any way related to OpenOffice, Telstra, or the story.

a few leeches are the reason why

[davidwr]

Well, in AU the actual marginal cost may be the reason to go metered.

In the USA, a few leeches cause ISPs to adopt "invisible quotas" and if you go over you get disconnected. Sure, these "invisible quotas" only affect a tiny minority of customers but frankly I'd rather see a pay-per-use model with a monthly minimum that covered 90% of users.

Something like:

$15 gets you HUGEQUOTA that 95% of people won't use up.
Another $15 gets you an additional HUGEQUOTA, preferably sold in $1 increments.
After $100 the price starts dropping since you are buying in volume.

The first $15 covers fixed costs but it also has low-usage users effectively subsidizing higher-usage users who close to but not over HUGEQUOTA.

Re:$150/GB? Dang that's expensive

[dbIII]

Is there any justification for these high marginal per-GB fees?

They own the copper. No justification just a government enforced monopoly for what is now a private body run by what appears to be the dregs of US telco management.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[mallie_mcg]

It is a big deal when compared to the bandwidth and data caps offered by Telstra to their customers

http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansandoffers/default.jsp

UP and DOWN

[sr180]

Not only do they meter your usage, they meter your uploads AND downloads. Most providors only meter your downloads.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Tony Hoyle]

although they used to have some that were called unlimited, until our equivalent of the FCC told them to stop it.

You mean you can't have '***UNLIMITED DOWNLOADS!!!*** $0.50/month (subject to fair use limit of 1mb a week)' type advertising over there?

You're more progressive than I thought. OTOH in the UK we have Ofcom, who don't so much regulate as sit on their fat arses drinking expensive wine and telling all the telcos what a great job their doing...

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Dan541]

Im a customer of bigpond I use open office and I dont care that they have done this I didnt even know you could download openoffice without incurring bandwith charge.

This is a non issue why has this article even been posted?

~Dan

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Tony Hoyle]

Bigpond decided to stop subsidizing the cost of distributing OpenOffice.org. I don't see the problem here. If you don't like it, change your plan to un-metered, change your ISP, or go to the library with your USB memory stick.

Yeah that's going to work in Australia...

Telstra own all the infrastructure anyway.. everyone pretty much charges the same.
As far as 'Go to the Library' goes.. have you *any* idea how spread out Australia is once you get outside the major cities? It's not exactly like wandering down the street.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Starayo]

You mean the average American ISN'T?!

This is surely a sign of the end times.

Easy to obtain consent to record calls

[tepples]

Some of the latest gems that were implemented is making employees wear voice recorders all day at work (illegal to record the customers they talked to and recorded without consent without a warrant) "Your call will be recorded to ensure quality of service." Customers who don't agree can hang up.

Re:Easy to obtain consent to record calls

[dbIII]

This was in the retail shops and in many cases the customers were not informed.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Tony Hoyle]

Well if someone's sending you the packets then either you requested them or something odd is going on.

Like nearly all ISPs they meter the usage at their routers.. they have no idea whether you requested it or not (theoretically they could maintain state but spread across a couple of thousand users that would never be cost effective in hardware terms).

It works for the rest of the world.. unmetered doesn't exist even if the ISP says it does. Some don't have hard and fast limits but they all have clauses in there that give them the right to kill your connection if your usage 'interferes' with other users... and for that to stick they'll need numbers.

Because Telstra have appaling plans.

[that_itch_kid]

Normally I'd agree with all the people saying that this is not a big deal, citing "it's a competitive product, etc."
Now, that's a fair point...at least it would be if Telstra's plans were not so shockingly bad. As Australia's biggest and most well known ISP/telecom company, they have a huge proportion of Australia's internet users. What a great deal of them don't realise is how much they're being shafted.

My plan:
256/64K (down/up), 12BG download limit, shaped to 64K.
AUD60/month (Which would be somewhere between US45-50, I think)

Not my choice, a family member chose the plan, I wouldn't have been so idiotic. Oh, and did I mention the 24-month contract? Yep, if you cancel your plan, you still pay for the full 24 months after signing the contract.

Consider this vs competing ISPs who offer twice the speed and bandwidth for half the price.

For some other plans with limits, the bastards charge 15c/MB (Which is roughly $150/GB). Imagine you are one of those poor people who were sucked in by Telstra's omnipresence and huge T.V. marketing campaign. OpenOffice is not small, and Telstra's servers are a place where you can get unlimited downloads. You'd be pretty pissed too if they pulled it.

Re:Because Telstra have appaling plans.

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Consider this vs competing ISPs who offer twice the speed and bandwidth for half the price.

That's putting it mildly. Compare that to mine:

ADSL2+, 24/1Mbps, 8GB limit on peak (12pm-12am), 32GB other times, $3.00 per GB excess usage, uploaded data not counted, all for $40/month. I won't tell my ISP, or else I'll be accused of advertising for them, but you can see the difference.

Re:Because Telstra have appaling plans.

[mikael_j]

That still seems quite limited, although if you're in Australia then I guess it's better than what most people are using...

OTOH, I'm swedish so ADSL2+ Annex M 24/3 Mbps with no transfer limits for USD50 per month is considered kind of expensive. I'm still waiting for my 100/100 ethernet jack though, had it in college through SUNET but I don't live in a student apartment anymore.

/Mikael

Re:Because Telstra have appaling plans.

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

That still seems quite limited, although if you're in Australia then I guess it's better than what most people are using...

Oh yeah, I guess it could be. Of course, I personally have only ever used around 4.7 GB in one month on peak, but if you're truly a heavy user I guess it would be. Our Internet speeds and penetration are certainly not considered world-leading. Not everyone has access to ADSL2+ here, only the richer suburbs (I'm kinda lucky that my area has very recently undergone some urban renewal). It's often expensive. My plan was by far the best value I could find for $40/month, with all the others having greatly reduced speeds, or download limits of 1GB or less. Mostly that's thanks to Telstra. Thankfully, we have just elected a government that has laid out a solid plan to significantly upgrade our internet infrastructure, and will hopefully won't screw over consumers and competitors like Telstra does.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Gideon Fubar]

Well.. you used to be able to, but the simultaneous deregulation of the telecommunications system and float of the publicly owned infrastructure as a private company made it kinda necessary.. There were some ridiculous things going on, including some clearly monopolistic practices on Telstra's part (e.g making the local loop avaliable, then charging higher wholesale prices than the retail they charged their won customers, etc.. ). Even Howard couldn't make that look like a free market.

Of course, what would really benefit the industry here is if Telstra still didn't own all the publicly paid for infrastructure..

I thought you were joking at first

[Lord Balto]

It looks fine to me. Larger than normal font.

Re:I thought you were joking at first

[beav007]

I was joking. I can read it fine.

It's going to be one of those days. *Sigh*...

I can't get to openoffice.org

[zhrike]

From cavalier's network (cavtel) in Philadephia. I've instead installed the google pak (choosing only star office) on pcs, or downloaded
it from work and stuck the archives on an external server (for other OSes). I never really thought much about it until now, and I am not sure why
they would stop or filter traffic, but I cannot load a page, let along download the entire installer.

Cavalier is also one of the annoying ISPs that hijack any non-existent URLs to another search domain (itemnotfound.com), so I've merely made static
host entries to kill it (not having my own DNS servers at home).
Just a general FYI.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[totally bogus dude]

Well, we're not all with Telstra. Most ISPs have their own content mirrors which are unmetered traffic for their customers. While all the ISPs do have to pay Telstra for bandwidth out to the exchanges at typical monopolistic rates, for end-users at other ISPs OOo will continue to be a free download from their ISP's mirror. And Telstra's customers are probably too stupid to know any better anyway (I say probably because there are some cases where using BigPond (Telstra's retail arm) makes sense, but they're few and far between).

But pretty much all you said is right. The liberal government really fucked up in selling Telstra off the way they did.

Metered Downloads?!?!

[Whatchamacallit]

They have to pay for data transfers? What the heck is up with that? In the USA we have virtually unlimited downloads and the only time someone runs abreast of that is if they download a heck of a lot in a short period of time. I mean they would have to be transferring 10 DVD ISO's a day before the ISP slaps them and shuts off their Internet connection.

Of course, there are other parts of the world that make the USA's Internet speeds look stupid by comparison. But Australia looks downright dismal if they lock you in with a contract and then mico-bill you once you've exceeded a ridiculously low amount of bandwidth.

I get approximately 20Mbps down and 2Mbps up with the possibility of short bursts of even more speed through a cable TV provider. But it doesn't come close to the pure fiber connections found in some industrialized Asian nations such as Japan or South Korea.

Re:Metered Downloads?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Most companies don't actually micro-bill you, you just get throttled down to dial-up speeds when you hit your limit. But the limits are atrocious - Telstra's download limit for a $60 (about US$50) per month ADSL2 plan is 600 MB!

We're pretty dependent on unmetered downloads for high-bandwidth updates, downloads, etc...

I know it makes sense Geographically that our internet infrastructure isn't going to be up there with South Korea, but it's still pretty damn embarrassing.

Re:Metered Downloads?!?!

[DJDuck]

It's called User Pays. It was also the answer to Unlimited being Limited really. If you want to download heaps of crap you pay for a higher cap, if you are a light user you can choose a cheaper plan. This stops leeches spoiling the fun for everyone while giving them the option to still download heaps of stuff without triggering unwritten limits. Australia has limited bandwidth to the rest of the world, but most of the content is located elsewhere, hence ISP's are forced to pay by the MB to use the international links, this is just how the recover their costs while allowing the user to prioritise themselves. It works for me. Telstra (BigPond owner and monopoly over the last mile) can get stuffed though. It's an American run monopolist, and tries it's hardest to screw customers over time and again. The sooner they are taken out of the picture the better.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Techman83]

Don't forget the "Broadband from as low as $14.97". Try explaining to your non-geek friends how this plan is bad and that they need to spend $40 a month to get anything slightly decent. You get ignored, they hook themselves up on a 24Mth pan (to get the first 3 months half price) and realise that $60 a month doesn't even get you remotely close to what the $40 plan from some other provider gives you and you don't have to be on a 2 year contract of which they can up the price any time they choose!!!!

This company (which is a monopoly in Australia) is the biggest reason why we only have "Fraudband" in Australia. They almost got a signed deal behind closed doors to "Expand" their network at the cost of Australian tax payers.

I could rant all day about this company and how much I hate the way they operate. They are up their with Microsoft and Sony.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Ramadog]

To put in perspective the entry level plans have measly bandwidth quotas from 200mb to 600mb per month. Then to add further insult to injury any additional usage is charged at $150 per GB.

You missed out the bit in the book that comes in the self install kit about software updates.

Section - usage traps and how to avoid them.
"You should be aware just what your operating system and other software might do automatically. Windows XP, for example, is designed to check for updates on a regular basis - then download them without asking you. (And recent updates have been more than 150MB!) You may want to check your software user guides, and see how to turn this feature off."

Very small monthly quota and a suggestion to turn little features like windows update off.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[YrWrstNtmr]

Well if someone's sending you the packets then either you requested them or something odd is going on.

One word:
Spam.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[aussie_a]

If by bad reasons you mean they're the only cable provider for a lot of areas, then yes, for bad reasons.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[kiwipeso]

Yes, the average aussie is a complete and utter idiot. Just look at how long they kept John Howard in government. :P

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[webmaster404]

Wow, and when I consider that I use around 60 MB for about 3 hours of normal web browsing on my Linux laptop (and thats not even counting internet on my Wii and PDA) and download about 2-3 700 MB or so Linux distros every month... I wonder how much that would cost! However (I am in the US) my ISP is local which gives me good download speeds (at like 4 A.M. when the rest of the people are sleeping) and they really don't care if I use 1 MB or 30 Gigabytes a month in bandwidth.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think up a good reason as to why this company should subsidize a competing product. These "free download" areas were setup because back in the day Telstra only had 12Gbps of international bandwidth and MCI who it was connected to at the other end was charging them heaps for it (apparently). So for the large software downloads - games patches, Linux distributions, etc. it made lots of sense for them to both a) keep unnecessary traffic off the international link and b) lower their own bandwidth costs.

I believe the former became significantly more important than the latter once their largest competitor here launched the Southern Cross Cable Network which gave 300Gbps of bandwidth internationally (compared to Telstra's own 19Gbps) since they were losing customers hand over fist to a competitor who was more in touch with what the customers wanted.

Telstra's monopoly here is so bad, they went from being the forefront of telecommunications (Australia isn't an easy country to provide that kind of service in, Telstra basically invented technologies like ISDN) to being a fat lazy pig with less R&D than your local winery, constantly playing catch-up. They can afford to do that though because they got 30+ years worth of infrastructure for free, and they know their competitors can't compete with that today without the kind of investment nobody is willing to make.

They still claim that 2400bps is more than sufficient bandwidth for your home. Even in the capital city their competitors have to use their exchanges (as wholesale customers) and Telstra under-provide services specifically to either piss you off with their competitor who has to wait on Telstra, or to entice or sometimes force you to use a significantly more expensive service of their own like their wireless broadband (for a time the only provider with that capability). They still charge about 3 times as much as their competitors for that - but they've locked people in to 12-24 month contracts at those exorbitant rates so they don't give a shit.

They have been in bed with Microsoft for so long they have contracted every disease that other most hated company could pass on. They prey on disabled and elderly people, tricking them into plans they can't possibly afford. They go to court to prevent their competitors providing better service. They are even so disorganised internally that they have 4 or more business areas competing against each other for business contracts. Their shopfronts and their call centres use two completely different systems - when forced into paying for their local exchange upgrade via their wireless broadband scam they initially denied my contract because one system claimed I had a bill unpaid for over 8 years! How that got past a tax audit I'll never know. They'll also tell you one thing on the phone and another thing at the shop.

Actually funny story here... I was after a cordless phone package. Remember they're the monopolist so are usually the first port of call unfortunately. They had a whole stack of boxes out the front - at least 15 of them. Not empty display models, the real thing. I took one and asked the saleswiener if I could get one more handset with it. He took the box out the back, spent considerable time, came back without it, and said they didn't have any. I asked if I could just have the standard package then. He said they didn't have any. I looked from him, to the back door he just took one through, to the stack of boxes out the front, and back at him and said something like "you must be joking" and he gave some glib apology. I walked out, into the Myer store next door, got the same package for $70 cheaper.

Basically, they are pathetic evil bastards who need to be choked like Jabba the Hut.

Re: TelstraClear in NZ

[kiwipeso]

Actually, TelstraClear is the most preferred phone company in Wellington and Christchurch, where it has a great cable network.
TelstraClear is the reason why Telecom charges less for phone lines in Wellington and Christchurch.

However, I do agree that Telstra in Australia and Telecom in NZ both are monopolies in dire need of reform and proper laws.

What if

[LingNoi]

I know, hence the "What if"

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Gideon Fubar]

Sad but true, i guess. And yes, monopoly is among the worst reasons. While it's possible to get cable from other providers, only Optus and Telstra have had the licenses and capacity until recently.

i dunno what your political stance is, but personally i'd rather the government was responsible for the infrastructure. At least they're accountable to the public.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Anonymous Coward]

Blatantly off topic, but my karma's fucked anyway - these posts are one of the best adverts possible for Noscript [noscript.net]. All that posting goes to waste if the Javascript won't start.

So since I don't want to click on the link, what is it? Goatse? Spam site?

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[clang_jangle]

Wow, sounds to me like having to go to openoffice.org is the least of Big Pond subscribers' problems... Also it strikes me as a bit weird, having such a crappy ISP and the one thing singled out for complaint is what they do and do not offer for download on their site.

old news

[chrome]

this happened over a month ago ... and we get an outcry now? I must say, but I really doubt there were that many people downloding OOO from the bigpond mirror.

Also, its a mirror. Mirror providers usually hold the right to remove anything that ceases to interest them anymore. Don't like it? Use a different mirror.

I doubt people on the 200mb plans are downloading OOO. They probably don't understand what it is.

IT veteran?

[Anonymous Coward]

Our reader, an IT veteran with more than 25 years experience in the IT industry, than asked support why OpenOffice was removed my arse if you were such an IT Veteran, with all this experience, you wouldn't have been with telstra in the first place!
thats whats wrong with telecommunication's in general, in Australia, yet everyone still complains, but still fucking uses them!!

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[iminplaya]

At least they're accountable to the public.

Heh, all we need now is for the public to hold them accountable.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Gideon Fubar]

Something tells me that the OOo crowd are more upset by this than Telstra subscribers..

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Your.Master]

Why do you download 2-3 Linux distros per month?

I'm not accusing you of lying, and I know I download many gigabytes per month on things that don't make sense to others, I'm just really curious about your use case.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[EugeneK]

Agreed, it makes no sense because any modern distro has a package maintenance system so you only have to fetch updates.
In addition, even the freshest linux distros will have bugs that one could have seen fixes faster for by updating one's distribution using the package manager's update functionality.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[JackMeyhoff]

I download my games over Steam regularly each of which are more than 1GB, these are products I paid for.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Torvaun]

Yeah, and they have done exactly that. Previously, they were also offering a service where you could download OpenOffice directly from them without it counting against your time or bandwidth usage or whatever they use as the meter. Now they don't. If you'd like to download OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org, you can do that just as you would if you were downloading anything else.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[cammoblammo]

We did that on November 24.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[iminplaya]

Yes, Thank you! You are setting a good example for the rest of the colonies. But all indications are that the American one isn't getting the message. The Party has a pretty good stranglehold on their hearts and minds, and I'm expecting another four years of business as usual.

BigPond removes A/V section and lies about it

[duncan bayne]

I have also confirmed that BigPond used to offer an anti-virus category on their unmetered download page, but that they recently removed it. When I asked why, the CSR with whom I was dealing flat-out lied and claimed they never had such a category. Details on my blog.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Z34107]

How did this get modded off-topic? Hell if I knew before reading this post why Telstra supposedly had a free download area, that you Aussies are stuck with "metered" conections, that they're a monopoly, etc, etc... It's directly related to what parent posts were discussing

About Telstra

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Their only credit is they manage to push communication technology into the public sector before anyone else. The ugly side is that they charge like a wounded bull for the privilege. Their prices are exorbitant, their contracts are insulting, and the data allotments for their internet services (as well as their excess usage charges) would be laughable if there weren't so many people tied to them.

I found out recently that someone I know was taking internet from them. $30 per month for dialup. No shit. Not only that, but there was some confusion about her contract period which would be at least 12 months, if not 24. They also have a $30 per month broadband service, but it also comes with a contract (for 12-24 months, I can't remember which), and 200MB of downloads at 256kbps. What's worse is that they advertise in huge lettering that it actually costs $14.95 per month, when is states in the small print that that pricing only applies to the first few months. That's the years old technology. The newer stuff like satellite or wireless cost north of $100 per month for 1-2GB per month allotments.

Not to mention, I hear it's terribly slow.

!news

[Komarosu]

Wake me up when they've blocked access to OO.org, maybe that would be newsworthy? Big whoop, use a OO mirror.

Re:!news

[crimperman]

Whilst I agree it's not news, TFS does say they pulled it from the unmetered download area. On that basis I would imagine the complaint would be that they have removed the ability for their punters to download it without using any of their bandwidth allocation.

On that basis OO.org or a mirror becomes irrelevant to the argument.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[cheater512]

Actually I am in Australia with a true unlimited connection.
Expensive and slow but its there.

Solution?

[zazzel]

Maybe the Australian Government should rethink their regulation of the market. Here in Germany the "Bundesnetzagentur" (federal network agency) regulates the prices and conditions under which the former monopoly (now: Deutsche Telekom) has to offer access to their infrastructure. It basically comes down to this: Competitors can rent space in Deutsche Telekom's switching centers AND can rent the "last mile" to the home. This last mile currently costs 11.80 EUR/month, with pressure from competitors' lobbying groups to further drop that number.

Currently, you can get DSL(2000-4000) for 29.90 EUR - including all national calls to landlines and unmetered DSL usage. I am currently on a DSL16000 plan for 34.90 EUR.

I know this is no sufficient solution to the Australian problem of intercontinental connections, but maybe a hint.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[tumbleweedsi]

There is only a limited amount of international bandwidth in Oz so downloading stuff from the US actually does incur a cost to the ISP compared with downloading from the ISP's own mirror. If an ISP is charged by the Mbit for data transfer then they have no option but to pass that cost on.

Comparatively. a lot of larger UK ISP's have multiple peering points and often own their own international cable so they have slightly better bargaining power when offloading data on peers, some even dynamically route traffic depending on which peer will give them the best price at that particular moment.

free CD shipments?

[wikinerd]

There are still many people in the world who don't have cheap access to the Internet, especially for downloading large files. This creates a barrier to the penetration of free software in rural communities and developing countries, or even in developed countries that suffer from a big telco megacorp that is either a state monopoly or recently privatised (and still a monopolist).

This may be a problem especially for free software and opensource developers, who often need to download large files (new distros or development libraries). They contribute to our global economy by creating free GPLed/BSDed software, but they may live in places where they have to pay too much for bandwidth, or even in places where broadband doesn't exist. This is unjust: Free software programmers should enjoy free services (gifts) by the society in which they live, because they create value for the economy through gifts (free software). Free software developers know how to participate in a gift economy, but the society at large only takes from them without giving them anything in return. This must change, we must teach the concepts of gift economies to more people, and especially help free software developers who don't have access to cheap broadband.

For these people the solution is to let others help them by sending them the free software they need (distros or devel libs, or even openoffice.org) in a CD or DVD. This can be done between friends, but some people, maybe perhaps some free software volunteers who are shy nerds, may not have many friends.

I am trying to bootstrap a wiki community (modelled after philanthropist giving circles) of people who want to help free software volunteers, and this Slashdot post gave me the idea to create this wiki page where you can use as a venue to organise shipments of CDs/DVDs containing free software (like openoffice.org) to verified free software volunteers. While the site is not well-known, it could work well if enough people join. So, if you are a free software developer and you need to download openoffice.org or other package and your download limit of your Internet connection has been reached and you can't easily pay for the download yourself (you may, for example, be between jobs or whatever), you can place your name (and a link to a changelog/etc that proves your free software status) in the wiki page explaining what software you need. Then when a person willing to send CDs/DVDs for free in your region joins the site and sees your request, they may agree to send you a disc containing the software you need (but you should check the MD5 hash, of course!).

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[True Vox]

Were I a betting man, I'd wager that the GP, like myself, is a dabbler. Not to say that he/she is not a "true" Linux user, quite the contrary. A dabbler, in my context, is rather one who has a great interest in Linux (and perhaps other *nix's as well), and as such, likes to try out all the "little guys" who come out month-to-month. The KDE4 previews, the ELive's, or even the Symphony OS's. None of them anything I'd confuse for "mainstream", yet all of them interesting in their own way, for the right people. I have QUITE a number of partitions on my hard drive, most filled with this or that distro (I virtualize sometimes, but I like the "Organic" feel of having a "real" install)

Of course, this is all my own opinion on the matter, certainly not trying to put words into the GP's mouth. IANAWebmaster404. ;D

Why did an ISP make an Office Suite?

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't their core.

So really the question becomes: Why do they block a common download for an application that has nothing to do with the ISP?

Its not isp its the BigPond

[Anonymous Coward]

The Isp are at fault here, In end the big blame should be place on Bigpond. They control all the nodes Australia has access to. And if you look at the whole of Asia and the area they only have 1/4 of nodes we in north America have. Its a tight scene over their, you can just image the up roar the big corps like Bigpond will make if Google actually drags their own optical cable over their.

It's news because it's unethical

[CarpetShark]

Why is this news? Because it clearly shows unethical thinking at work, and people sense that deep down, even if their background of growing up under dodgy corporate leaders tells them "it's just business".

The fact is, if you can provide something to someone without charge, and you then take time to remove that because you want them to pay for an entirely different service... well then, very simply, you're deliberately going out of your way to screw people.

Telstra's exorbidant ADSL pricing

[joes_meat]

My ISP, internode, has installed their own DSLAMS in many exchanges in Australia. (I'm not even going to start on how difficult Telstra has been in letting other companies install equipment in the exchanges.) But it is $10 per month MORE to connect to a 1.5Mbps Telstra connection, than a 24Mbps Internode connection.

The world is one big free ride!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the issue is that for Australians using this ISP, downloading it from www.openoffice.org will incur bandwidth charges (as opposed to downloading the competing application from the ISP's official download siter).

OMG, you mean people actually have to spend something to get what they want?

How terribly unfair! That's not how the world works!

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Gnavpot]

So, in other words, the average Aussie is a complete and utter idiot?

Quote from former New Zealand Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon:
"New Zealanders who leave for Australia raise the IQ of both countries."

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot. They have every right to decide what's available for download on their own download area! WTF is so confusing about this?! People like you are constantly embroiled in the travesty d'jour...where every little thing you see is through a prism of personal outrage.

grow up.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[EugeneK]

Another thing I though of is that the installer might be more likely to correctly configure your hardware according to whatever the latest and greatest drivers are - merely updating an existing distribution will perhaps be less likely to reconfigure the drivers. This is by design in the interest of stability. So if you're doing server installs, updates are fine, but if you have shiny new desktop hardware, I can see why you'd want to do a fresh install periodically in the interest of getting the best desktop experience.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[webmaster404]

Mostly because I like to see what advancements have been made recently. I know that it isn't typical but I enjoy testing the bleeding edge.

blatent re-brand

[dbuzz]

Some how I doubt that they have written their own office package, it's a blatant case of host open office until we are finished re-branding it. Would be interesting to see a side by side comparison of the programs, does anyone have a link for "Big pond" ?

Unmetered Ubuntu Repository

[nospamboz]

To be fair, after they removed OpenOffice.org and anti-viruses, they added Ubuntu main, restricted, and universe repositories to their unmetered area, for Gutsy and Hardy. See http://files.bigpond.com/ for details.

Re:http://www.openoffice.org/

[True Vox]

Ah, indeed a possibility. God knows the Ubuntu's have been getting better and better every rev.

Really Angry

[codingmasters]

I've had it up to my neck with Telstra, and this is seriously the last straw.