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AU Goverment To Break Up Telstra; Filtering News
benz001 writes "The Minister who has pushed the ridiculous broadband filter plan has at least won a few brownie points with yesterday's press conference, in which he promised to force Telstra to split its network and wholesale businesses. Australia's largest ISP, and the country's main infrastructure owner, will be given a chance to implement the structural separation voluntarily; if it does not, the Government will step in with legislation. Here is the Minister's official press release." And speaking of the filtering program, reader smash writes "After several years of debate and electioneering, some statistics on the Australian national web filtering effort have been disclosed. Apparently, the typical Aussie web surfer is 70 times more likely to win the national lotto than stumble across a blocked page. Additionally, despite the claim that the main aim of the filter is to block child pornography, only 313 of the 977 total sites blocked is on the basis of child porn. At $40M AU so far in taxpayers funds, the cost so far is around $40,900 per blocked URL. Government efficiency at work..."
Implementation of a system like that unavoidably involves substantial fixed costs(both at startup and per year). Once you have one, though, incremental costs should be pretty low. Thus, the obvious way of making it "more efficient" in dollars/URL terms is to use it a lot more.
Obviously, the mere existence of the system sucks, and taking pot-shots at governmental inefficiency is always fun; but there is a serious point here(although this program is a poor example, since it shouldn't exist at all):
Inefficiency is bad; but do not make the mistake of assuming that procedural restraint is a form of inefficiency. After all, courtrooms could be much more efficient, in case/year terms, if jury trials and defense attorneys were abolished. Prisons would be much more efficient, in dollars/year/inmate terms, if they were kept as full and as crowded as possible. And just think of the negative impact of the internal affairs division on the number of officers actively patrolling the streets, a terrible waste.
If your justice system allows efficiency to replace justice as the primary criterion, you have issues.(Of course, if your justice system allows public hysteria and political convenience to replace justice as the primary criteria, you get web censorship schemes).
As an Australian citizen I have to say I am ashamed of Australia's level of corruption at all levels of government (and the lower the level the higher the corruption) from local to state to federal. With a justice system for which truth is no defence against an allegation and unions that have no interest in actually doing their job.
Is Internet Filtering about protecting Australians or giving authorities more reason to prosecute and more agencies kickbacks for "essential services"?
Here in Australia you don't even need to break a present law to have committed a crime. The Australian Tax Office (or Federal Government) can, at any time, pass legislation that applies retrospectively. For anyone with a short memory consider the repealed alcopop tax in 2009, the luxury car tax that was levied prematurely, the petrol taxes levied by Keating without budget approval in the senate, etc etc.
People get excited about Australia but it is just the weather and landscapes that are worth raving about. The regulatory system has nothing fair or just about it.
At the age of 15 I could tell the Telstra Share Offers were vastly overpriced, this is why they only sent their prospectus to selected individuals in the first release. Telstra has held back the advance of internet and telecommunications services in this country and why should we help them hold it back even further for the sake of other peoples bad investment.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
From the article it sounds like they are implementing something like what the British government did with BT, that the 2 firms cannot give each other preferential treatment, or special rates. To encourage competetion.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
... until they get a a $280 bill for going over their transfer limit on their $29.95/month 200mb plan. Note I said transfer limit as Telstra include uploads and downloads in that.
My daughter spent 2 hrs on a kids games website at her grandparents house not long after they signed up to Telstra. This put their account over the limit, and combined with all the other traffic that went across the account in the first month, they received a $280 bill. Despite my repeatedly telling them that they should choose a better ISP (one which only includes downloads in the transfer limit for a start, and one that has a transfer limit that takes more than 10 minutes to chew through for another) I was the one who got yelled at. They were perfectly reasonable with the customer support person... *grumble*
Apparently the sales person told them that 200mb is more than they will ever need in a month for their account. I'd like to find someone in Telstra's sales department and see if they can convince me that they don't need wings to fly as i throw them from the nearest rooftop, by the sounds of things they might actually be able to convince me!
... wait, what?
No, this is excellent news, should have been done years ago. The problem with Telstra is that, as well as being a front-end retailer and ISP, they own all of the back-end infrastructure. Despite regulations that are supposed to allow access by other providers to the back-end infrastructure, Telstra have always managed to find a way to charge more for other companies to use the infrastructure than it costs themselves, giving Telstra (ISP) an unfair advantage over other ISP's.
Now, the retail end of Telstra (the part that would presumably keep the brand name) will need to compete on a level playing field with the other telcos for a share of the wholesale bandwidth. There is no reason for there to be any kind of special relationship between the separated arms of (former) Telstra, anyway there are plenty of existing laws (eg, price fixing!) to discourage that.
I don't agree that "people don't know better" than use Telstra. That might have been true for the first decade after deregulation, but no longer. Telstra is universally loathed in Australia, and people who still use it tend to only do so because in some markets (but by no means all) they are the cheapest.
Hahaha. Your standards are so low it's laughable. "Generous download allowance" of 35 gigabytes? Your attitude is mind-numbingly ignorant.
If most of your data went through underseas cables, then why does your cap apply to all traffic?
You also realize most of the popular sites Australians visit are hosted locally in Australia, right? This reduces costs for the content providers as well as the ISPs.
Japan is a similarly isolated island country, and yet affordable 1 gbps connections are proliferating in urban areas.
Do you fully comprehend that the institution of caps is a gross abuse of the progress of internet technology? Speeds (and routers) increase according to Moore's Law. You should be experiencing internet speed increases on par with hardware speed increases.
Japan is a similarly isolated island country, and yet affordable 1 gbps connections are proliferating in urban areas.
Population density of Japan: 337.6/km2
Population density of Australia: 2.833/km2
Theres a reason that 1gbps connections are available in Japan, but not Australia. For how isolated we are as a country here, its remarkable that we have the internet as good as we do.
Indeed, and any suggestion otherwise is merely FUD.
Having worked for Telstra, their attitude toward wholesale customers is absolutely terrible. They are deliberately given worse service than Telstra customers, even though ALL Australians paid for the network they "own". This is great news and I have been pushing for this as a viable alternative to the mess that is Aussie telecoms - mind you, most people have no idea of the real impact and just parrot the FUD spreaders.
I wouldn't be surprised if bloodhawk is in Telstra middle management.
The separation of Telstra's wholesale and retail divisions has been discussed heatedly for many years, long before the change of government. The previous administration was happy to let it stand, which made Telstra investors happy but pissed off Telstra customers as well as competitors, not to mention holding back innovation. You only have to look at the number of times Telstra has lost in fights with the ACCC, the courts and even the government to see why this was a mistake.
The only group of people who are opposed to Telstra being split are the (unlucky) shareholders. Pretty much everyone else who has had to deal with Telstra are unhappy with their service and pricing, their treatment of retail customers and wholesale customers.
I'm not saying that the government's NBN plan is well-thought-out or anything, but Telstra's joke of a proposal and their juvenile "change the law to suit us or we take our toys and leave" attitude is even worse for the competitive landscape and the general Australian public. A split can't come soon enough.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Absolutely true.
I have seen something similar going on in The Netherlands, where KPN (traditionally the only fixed-line telephone provider) has been forced to give access to other companies to their network, at good rates. Those rates are determined by the government, periodically reviewed, and are cost plus reasonable profit for the maintenance of the existing network.
It took a while, but first the IDD providers got in - users had to dial a four-digit prefix to select the carrier. Then those IDD providers also started to provide long-distance calls, with the same four-digit prefix. Then small devices came that would dial that prefix for you automatically and transparently. And now even that is not necessary anymore, users can directly set the IDD and long-distance carrier. And are billed by that carrier.
The same of course for ADSL services provided over the POTS network. First KPN's own povider Planet Internet was basically the only one, now there are dozens or even hundreds competing on the ADSL market, providing great choice for the consumer.
The only problem left is that because KPN owns the cables, so it is always a KPN technician that comes to your home to make necessary connections. And the communication between you (consumer that wants a connection), ISP (that has to set up your account) and KPN (that has to connect the cables) is not always going perfectly well.
There are astonishing anti-competitive roadblocks to wholesalers. I recently looked into converting my internet service into a naked service, but the caveats and hoops they have to jump through made me give up for now.
The internet service stays the same, the physical wire stays the same, the exchange connections pretty much stay the same, all that I wanted to change was moving the line rental from Telstra to my ISP. To do so would require a totally new service to be commissioned with extended outages, and was told this is an artificial limitation.
POKE 36879,8
The truth is instead that if Telstra didn't have a government mandated monopoly then Sol or Ziggy would have completely destroyed it due to their mismanagement. The price of a government mandated monopoly and having a government as the largest shareholder (future fund) is that the government can take that away.
Telstra have not been "playing ball" since about 1996! I also don't see how you can blame the Prime Minister for the money grubbing scam of the previous government of the Telstra float. A company that spends millions buying a dodgy pirate ringtone company in China and a thousand other bits of stupidity should not be immune to government action when it is in the national interest and the government is the major shareholder. The government has to get more out of it than a place to put good mates on the board, which is nearly all the previous government did. It needs better management than letting a failed farmer pick a silver tongued mexican bandit as a CEO then get that seconded by a historian too radical to get a good job in academia and a corrupt businessman that bought his way onto Australias TV screens as a pathetic copy of Letterman.
Kevin Rudd's huge ego really has nothing to do with it. We are all paying life support for a disfunctional corporation that could not exist in a competitive environment. We effectively have a government Qango that the government can not control and expending far more money while delivering far lass than it would if it was run by the government or was run like a private corporation. Sol must have been laughing all the way to the bank as he came over, called his friends over to join the feeding frenzy and contracted out many failed projects at vast expense with nothing delivered to friends at Andersons/Accenture and others.