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Major Australian ISP Pulls OpenOffice

Posted by kdawson on from the can't-stand-the-competition dept.

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."

6 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Other sites? by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  2. Why is this news ? by Alain+Williams · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  3. Wow, how slightly irritating... by Lendrick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ by Broken+Toys · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Confusing article title by ozzee · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Big Pond? by Fex303 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?)