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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.