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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."
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?
expandfairuse.org
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 ----
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).
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.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
They are an ISP, if they blocked their customers from reaching http://www.openoffice.org/ that would be news.
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.
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
...unless you count "acting as any company with some sense of business-strategy would have done" as news.
Pure awesomenes
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.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Actually, not true, because now they're giving special treatment to users of their own service.
Slightly less net neutral than before.
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.
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?
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.
.
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.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
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.
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
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
Not only do they meter your usage, they meter your uploads AND downloads. Most providors only meter your downloads.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
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?!
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.
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..
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
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.
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.
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."
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.
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/
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.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
I download my games over Steam regularly each of which are more than 1GB, these are products I paid for.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
We did that on November 24.
Cogito, ergo sig.