Slashdot Mirror
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."
I hate your font, it's so damn small..
.odt files since after all it would "be competitive with BigPond Office".
Anyway on with the topic, I have one better then that.
What if the ISP restricted file transfers of
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.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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.
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
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.
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.....
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.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
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