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