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Australia's Largest ISP Ditches Linux Mirror
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's largest ISP, BigPond, has decided to ditch its local mirrors of Linux and other open source operating systems, as well as various other open source software and Creative Commons media. BigPond posted a terse update on the service's website, citing reasons of low popularity and the existence of better services like download.com and Tucows. BigPond customers are not impressed by the move, given that the ISP is infamous in Australia for its high prices and relatively low monthly quotas of bandwidth (many users are on 10GB or 25GB per month plans) and all downloads from this service did not count towards their monthly limits."
Those users should shop around, any switch that supports DSL or DSL 2+ can be used by any of the ISP. TPG has some of the best plans in AU, however they have really crap customer service, but you really don't need it once your up and running.
capitalism is grand. king quarter. year over year increase or die at home crying.
signatures are for fools with hands
It's not as if people are forced to stay with BigPond or anything. I haven't had a BigPond internet account since Dial-Up internet days.
if you're on a multimux you're pretty much fucked. No ADSL2+ for you unless they've started reselling Telstra ADSL2+ services. Telstra are still the only ISP available in some areas. I live 4.1km from the exchange on horrible quality cabling, ADSL constantly drops out. I therefore use the coaxial cable tv network. Telstra are the ONLY Cable provider in my state. This move has essentially fucked me. I have 25gb per month both uploads/downloads and I'm paying $200/month for that service. That's with phones/net/cable tv bundled together
The reason they weren't popular is because the mirrors sucked, they were often slow to get updates and they were slow generally. I can get better speeds from the Netherlands than I can from my local Bigpond Mirror.
It's what you get when you partly privatise a government monopoly and then pretend the government has nothing to do with it anymore but make it difficult for anyone else to compete.
Nobody shuts down a mirror that isn't soaking up any bandwidth. Nobody has a slow mirror that nobody uses. I'm putting my money on them having ditched it because it outgrew their initial provisioning and they couldn't afford to expand to keep up, not because it was "low popularity."
Back in 2004 the Bigpond file mirror used to be a good service (I used it a lot while at work) but recently I tried it use it and noticed that it wasn't very well maintained anymore, of course they should have gone the other way and fixed the service.
10 gig or 25 gig a month? They're the luck users!
Seriously - their most popular plan has a 2gig limit for "only" $40 a month - with excess usage charged at 15c a meg. That's over $2,000 a gig! Both up and down are counted.
People who use bigpond are seriously deluded. Considering rivals offer 130gig a month for $40, no excess usage charges, and only downloads count...
no linux user users bigpond.
Friends don't let friends use bigpond.
So a mirror is shutting down. What's big deal?
The problem is that people on Telstra Bigpond pay top dollar for an internet connection with a fairly low download allowance (in the order of 10GB per month), using this mirror means they can download a multi gigabyte Linux distro without subtracting from their pitifully low download allowance. These days they slow your internet speed when you exceed your allowance, but at one stage they used to change 17c per MB once you reached your allowance (counting both uploads and downloads) and unsuspecting people ended up with internet bills worth thousands.
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So the company took away a service that they were offering for free. They were in no way obligated to continue this hosting. Why is this news to anyone?
17, I remember when it was 19.
I know you're on Slashdot but do you have line filters/ADSL splitters on each phone jack? As this sounds like your line is dropping from the phone or fax interfering.
seriously iinet is currently the best residential aussie isp in terms of price and service (btw they have some linux mirrors - a lot of linux iso images and fedora and ubuntu update/package mirrors + others) .
Telstra is really just running on it's own momentum at this stage. It's a mammoth uncompetitive organization that relies on it's own size and slowly eroding monopoly as a substitute for quality services. It's lack of vision and fear of progress is a huge weight on Australia's internet services.
It's mind-boggling just how much telstra steals from their customers, they don't even pretend to have a good service anymore. Even bigpond customers know they are getting fucked. They have to resort to stupid animal cartoons to sell anything.
BTW the telstra ad at the top of the page is hilariously ironic
Everyone knows Telstra are greedy arseholes. Their only customers are people who aren't aware of any alternatives or who live outside metro areas.
I honestly can't recall EVER having heard a word in their favor.
Telstra is a sad case of a company. The ex-government telephone monopoly, it was privatized and the profits of that went into the "Future Fund." Sounds nice, but it's just a fancy name of for the public service pension fund. (You can almost imagine the delight on the faces of the public servants and politicians who thought this idea up - it's their pension fund!)
Telstra was run into the ground by a American CEO Solomon Trujillo. He was hired at a time that anyone with an American accent could get a CEO job in Australia. Aussies were that parochial. But Trujillo did a really crap job. He only installed ADSL2 at exchanges where competitors installed ADSL2. He didn't kiss the butt of the government of the day, which is the custom in Australia. Combine all that and the share price sagged. Telstra continued to offer the most overpriced and poorly serviced offerings, relying on ill-informed consumers who believed "You can't go wrong with Telstra." Hell. I've got two service complaints over a year old they still haven't fixed.
Sadly when the previous government sold off Telstra, they let them take all the wiring with them which means any ISP who sells an ADSL service must house it in Telstra's exchanges and over their wires. Telstra doesn't need to be competitive, which is why broadband in Oz is still so expensive. There is one competitor - Optus - who has their own cable, but they gave up before they wired half the country and being appointed as a duopoly (yes, the government before last actually did that!) they don't have to be competitive either: all they have to do is match Telstra, to the point Telstra and Optus offer the worst deals in the country.
A few days ago the government paid Telstra $11B for access to their wires and infrastructure and (believe it or not) to compensate them for the future loss of customers. That's right. I hate Telstra and can't wait to leave them, but the government is actually using my tax dollars to compensate a company for losing my business through their own sheer ineptitude.
Don't expect changes. After the disaster of the Telstra privatisation the Rudd ^H^H^H^H Gillard government are creating a new national broadband network... which is what that $11B is for. But they've also announced an intention to privatize it making exactly the same mistake as last time. One of the heads of this effort is Michael Kaiser, an Labour party politician (kicked out for electoral fraud) who is now earning $450K a year appointed without so much as a job interview.
And this, my friends, is why telecommunications in Australia is such a mess.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/how-to-get-a-450000-job-no-ads-required--just-a-nice-word-from-the-minister-20100209-no66.html
http://www.smh.com.au/business/sol-trujillo-was-worse-than-he-looked-20100211-nv22.html
http://www.moneymorning.com.au/20091202/kris-sayce-scam-telstra.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly
This really makes no sense:
1) The primary reason is that an ISP wants more than anything to avert large traffic to and from THE INTERNET to their network. Internal traffic doesn't bother them as much, since that incurs much less cost. By having a local mirror to such huge files, they can avert a lot of traffic.
2) It was obviously a benefit to their customers, not to the rest of the world, since it didn't count against their user's download quotas.
3) It costs almost nothing to add such a service. A simple machine (or re-purposed older machine), running Linux/BSD, with a $50 hard drive stuck on their network would have more than enough horsepower and disk space to offer the service. Throw an hour a month of maintenance on it. They probably spend 100 times that on toilet paper.
4) If it were costing them external bandwidth, they could just block it to the rest of the Internet, keeping it for their customers.
5) I doubt their demographic is THAT much different from the rest of the world, so there is no doubt there would be a demand for such files by their users.
6) If usage were "low", it would probably only be because it was mis-managed, poorly setup, or their users simply didn't know it existed.
To me, this sounds more political than rational.
so why trouble their poor little minds with actually even knowing they have a choice of ISP or OS.
Could this be related too? Perhaps they will get a cheap upgrade to Windows Server they use?
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.bigpond.com
Latest movie or Linus/RMS? Which would you choose? *g*
Besides jokes, I always, blindly stayed away from ISPs using "Windows Server" since it tells a lot about the quality of staff and management. Of course I understand it is not always possible.
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I think people are amazed at how brain dead they are and what a big lie "bandwidth cap" is. If they really required bandwidth caps, not just keeping the mirrors up (even 10 users matter), they would also cache OSX/Windows updates with squid.
So, they are either stupid or malicious or even both.
While on it, they are a Windows based ISP. I really wonder what will their "windows server 2008" upgrade cost will be after this action?
The problem for us was that no one was using the mirror. It's easier for users to use a search engine and find the download site than it is for them to check the mirror and the network was so fast that grabbing something from a local server wasn't much faster than getting it from the remote place. We were downloading a few tens of GBs of a particular version of a Linux distro, but if no one bothered getting the local copy then it was simply wasted bandwidth. And if someone only wanted CD1 of the x86 version, we were getting 10-20GB in order for them to have a slightly faster download of 650MB of stuff. Not really useful.
For an ISP, getting CDNs to install a big mirror on their network saves them a lot more external bandwidth than running their own mirror that users have to remember exists will.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Fair enough. Linux users all probably don't use telstra anymore for years :)
bash$
He was hired at a time that anyone with an American accent could get a CEO job in Australia.
Any particular American accent?
Southern: "Hi y'all! I rek'on I cane I run this company reaaall good! Bless your hearts!"
Black: "Yo homes. I'll get this bitch going on the slick, man."
Surfer: "Duuuuuuuude! I'd run this company, like, so, like, knarly, dude! Duuuuuuuuuuuuude!"
New York: "I'm hear to help uze gize. What the fuck are uze look'in at! You wanna piece of me!?"
Fargo: "Ya! I kan Run dis kompany. Ya - sur kan."
I'm only asking because I need a job and who knows, there may be still some Australian companies that haven't learned their lesson yet.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
The agreement is for Telstra to allow the NBN to use their pits and conduits - not their actual telco infrastructure. The deal is awesome for end users - its essentially doing what people have recommended for ages: splitting Telstra into government-controlled infrastructure which is wholesaled to all comers without prejudice, and into a private retail arm which competes equally with all other ISPs.
I have no idea why Telstra's shares are rising on the news - monopoly of the infrastructure was the only thing they had going for them.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Speaking of duopolies don't forget Labor and Liberal, their cosy arrangement doesn't help.
To say they "slow your internet speed" really doesn't do it justice. They throttle it. They choke it down to speeds that are just unbelievably low. So low, that you can't even log into your account on Telstra's own website to check your usage, and that checking your @bigpond email account takes minutes just to download a single short email without any attachments. I think until recently, they were quoting 64kbps as the shaping speed, but any test I did didn't even get about 12kbps. In comparison, I think the standard shaping speed on the lowest plans for any other decent ISP is now 256kbps. If all you were doing is browsing, and not making huge downloads, or trying to load up multiple streaming videos at once....you might honestly not even notice a shape at that speed.
Usually, an ISP mirror of Linux (RH etc) is setup by enthusiastic sysadmins. They want it for their own servers and it is not much h/w expense to extend the mirror to the public.
When the Ferengi (accountants, marketing) that run the ISP become aware of the mirrors and realize it may impact revenue or cost in some way... they get shut down. Not all ISPs are like this... just the ones that are accounting firms masquerading as technology/telecommunications companies.
"all [Optus} have to do is match Telstra, to the point Telstra and Optus offer the worst deals in the country."
Optus actually have much better deals (and customer service) than Telstra...
Optus.....20mbps/512kbps, 170GB cap, $70/mth
Telstra...10mbps/512kbps, 50GB cap, $90mth.
iiNet......24mbps/1024kbps, 120GB cap, $60/mth.
On the very few occasion I have had to ring Optus customer service over the last 10yrs they have fixed the problem within 30 minutes (a responsive hope desk is important to me since I work 2 days a week from home). Recently they have started ringing me every 3 months or so just to ask if I'm satisfied with their service. OTHOH I cannot in good faith recommend Optus telephony services to anyone.
Disclaimer: I worked as a contractor on Telstra's "mission critical" systems during the 90's but would not recommend them, even to my worst enemy!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The New York attitude comes the closest, he was born in the US but thanks to political cartoonists most Aussies think he's from Mexico
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well of course they are dropping it, they can charge their users more this way. Sounds like every other 'data provider' out there.
But when the golden goose is long since dead and cooked, they will wonder where all their customers went and why no one gets online anymore.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Telstra was run into the ground by a American CEO Solomon Trujillo. He was hired at a time that anyone with an American accent could get a CEO job in Australia. Aussies were that parochial. But Trujillo did a really crap job.
Yeah he was a shocker, but realistically when he took over Telstra was already in shambles. The ACCC had at that point already firmly put its foot down on Telstra charging it's wholesale customers more than their retail customers, and once they were forced to charge a sane price the only think keeping them in business was the abysmal range and poor coverage of ADSL compared to Telstra's cable network.
But no what really drove the company into the ground was their previous CEO Dr Ziggy Switzkowski. A guy who's history in management was a Bachelor of Science, a PhD in Nuclear Physics, 6 years of post doc research, followed by an idiots guide to management course at Harvard. A short stint at Optus and then the top job of Australia's biggest monopoly. This is like letting a fat kid with ADHD loose in a candy store. He completely ignored most of Telstra's core competencies and spent as much money as possible on media deals and overseas investments trying to buy Australia's way into the Asian telecom market.
But then came the genius bit. While haemorrhaging money from every corner, with the ACCC beating down on Telstra's ass for screwing customers with a pineapple their master stroke was to introduce the worst fucking capped limits on their previously unlimited customers the world has ever heard of. Bad enough they are trying to run the company into the ground but then he made Australia the laughing stock of the world by changing their previous unlimited 10mbps cable to an "acceptable use policy" (actually 10GB download limit), and then down to 3 (YES THREE) GB per month with both downloads and uploads metered.
We moved house, and Telstra offered us a $180 loyalty bonus when we called them to cancel our service, followed shortly by a $50 relocation fee where we relocated to a house completely wired up and didn't need to do so much as call a service tech. We just took their biggest, fastest and most expensive plan ran with it for one month, and have been happy, richer, and less restricted TPG customers ever since.
I mean seriously Telstra business plans charge extra for fixed IPs, where as most other providers give them away with consumer plans. They can't even price their business plans right.
Telstra caters to two main demographics (there are exceptions, but few and far between):
iinet is more likely to be the isp to maintain this sort of thing... and they do.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It's simple. Bigpond + Tel$tra (the associated Telco) are a bloody ripoff; they rely on noobie customer naivety. They offer some of the worst plans around. The best deals have always been from smaller ISP's, amazing considering the latter have to purchase bandwidth from Tel$tra a lot of the time. I've never been silly enough to sign up with Bigpond, but several friends have, and the result seems to be uniformly that they get ripped-off. By the way, Telstra is quite fond of pestering people to join Bigpond during and after pitches about their phone services. I once got to the stage of having to spell out FORCEFULLY that I was NOT interested in changing my ISP, and did not appreciate their pressure-tactics about it. Eventually a friend grabbed the phone and told them to "Fuck Off", which may have got the message across :-)
In addition, Bigpond has always been blatantly in bed with Micro$oft. When BigPond was being set up, the smaller ISP's pleaded with the Government for a fair share, but it fell on deaf ears as the pollies had seemingly been seduced by M$.
Bigpond's open-source support has always been almost non-existent. Even OS-X is secondary. So it's little wonder that their customer-base doesn't frequent the mirror much.
A lot of Linux users find better support with other ISP's, so they use them instead.
To digress a bit, Tel$tra itself offers some pretty bad telephone plans as well. Telstra sold me an alledgedly money-saving phone plan. The result is completely different (and vastly more expensive) than what was offered in the call-centre sales pitch, despite my fairly frugal usage. Of course they are not the only telco who seem to do their best to confuse and diddle their customers; have you ever waded through the details of competing mobile plans?
It's not that good for the users. If you have a fault you have to get your ISP to get on to the wholesaler to get it fixed. The wholesaler will give the ISP the run around an no amount of shouting at your ISP can get it fixed. And you cannot contact the wholesaler directly to shout at them. Often the ISP is unwilling to open faults with the wholesaler because the wholesaler charges them outrages fees for doing so. The end result is it can take up to a year or more to get faults sorted.
I understand Australia is quite far away from the rest of the world and may not have as many cables and such, but why such lwo download limits?
It seems like there would be a natural limit that would be the capacity divided by consumer and business needs, and that ISPs are artificially lowering this limit to increase profit.
Australia only has a few big ISPs right, with the rest buying their internet from the few large ISPs, so they inherit these limits?
Is this not akin to price-fixing or so? Why is this not illegal?
Why are ISPs allowed to hold back the communication technology of a country like this?
I've already seen one site prominent in the free software world blame this on Microsoft. Telstra has a guy on their board of directors who once worked for Microsoft. They think he didn't really leave Microsoft--he's just pretending so he can infiltrate Telstra and turn them away from Freedom and toward Microsoft. (They have a huge list of companies that are secretly under the control of Microsoft this way, along with much of the press and even several major governments, and one or two major Linux distribution).
Large file libraries such as download.com and tucows.com offer a range of files and content we can not match, so we have taken the reluctant decision to discontinue this service.
The affected files are "... files include Windows utilities and drivers, along with a variety of Linux software such as the popular Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora distributions." so as such the change in corporate policy doesn't constitute an attack on Linux per se. While their users want or require those files, What this policy really represents is the classic corporate tactic of letting others supply materials from which they and/or their consumers derive use. In Corporate speak these materials are "Externalities", in which a corporation maximizes its profits by offloading its costs to others or the public. This is accomplished only because of the apathy of those on to whom the costs are transfered See part 4 of the video "The Corporation".
BTW, this is the tactic Microsoft used to finance the coding of Win95:
"3) Convincing Employees to Take Less Real Wages: Microsoft aggressively markets stock options to new employees in an effort to take wage expenses off the books. They also know that they can pocket the exercise price employees will be required to pay to take ownership of the stock. What also seems clear is that Microsoft is still aggressively marketing its stock option program to new recruits. To quote an email received, "I am about to begin employment at Microsoft and the stock option was the selling factor. Does your article overall state that it will be bad for me and will fail me in my retirement planning?" Is Microsoft fulfilling its disclosure obligations to its own employees, especially those that have put their entire 401K balance in Microsoft stock? This explains how 22 percent of Microsoft's massive cash balance has actually come from its own employees in the form of them prepaying their own wages through stock option exercise prices."
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Note that BigPond Office was only compatible with Microsoft office.
Sure looks like a Big Pond will be a small puddle in a couple of years.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
As opposed to now, where if you have a fault, you have to get your ISP to get on to Telstra to get it fixed, and Telstra is actively in competition with your ISP, and thus has a disincentive to ever fix your connection.
Often the ISP is unwilling to open faults with the wholesaler because the wholesaler charges them outrages fees for doing so.
I've never heard anything indicating this - is this your experience with wholesalers in other countries? Because the NBN is still to embryonic to have nitty gritty details like outage fees sorted out.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I have no idea why Telstra's shares are rising on the news - monopoly of the infrastructure was the only thing they had going for them.
Not anymore, their mobile arm has reached the point where it's more profitable than the PSTN arm (and now that they're selling their their copper to someone else, they don't have to maintain the aging cables anymore.) I'd suggest that the cost of 'wholesaling' a copper line is going to increase, because it's going to need constant maintenance and that cost won't be subsidised by any more profitable arms of the business. (It also won't be price locked by the ACCC.)
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
FYI, Optus didn't 'give up' wiring their cable, they were forced out of it by greedy, crooked councils deciding to charge through the nose to get cable laying permits, then turning around and accusing optus of violating standards and safety specifications when they didn't pony up on the permits.
at one stage they used to change 17c per MB once you reached your allowance
Considering that you can get a $1 / month plan from TPG that only charges 2.75 c / MB (over 3G, no less) this is almost criminal.
Thanks to the story here about Bigpond's file library decision, in the process of further reading I found out about their discount offer, which they probably only want new customers to hear about. As an existing customer, I wasn't notified, though to avoid complaints of discrimination, is also available to existing customers.
Their file library decision has now saved me (cost them) $180/yr — plus I get enough extra allowance to download a Linux distro a week. Thank you Slashdot and the anonymous story poster.
(I know there are better plans from other vendors, but being so far from an exchange, I need to stick with cable to get decent speeds.)
Everything to do with that company is SHIT.
As an example - use THEIR white pages online, J Smith, 33 Smith Street, Smithtown, (post code) 1234, (state) Victoria; and then watch every J (J or BJ or CN and JD), AND every Smith, in every street, in every town, in every postcode, in every state come up in the fucking returns... with only 20 entries to a page and 600 pages of results....
This companies management and most of the staff are total fuckholes....
http://www.nationaltimes.com.au/opinion/politics/your-call-is-important-to-us-20091122-isqh.html?comments=410
435 comments Why bother? I changed to Iinet years ago and have never had a problem. Plus I get to watch my favourite ABC shows on iview without it coming off my quota. Same for streaming audio. Friends and colleagues have gone to other ISPs and are happy there, too. If more people voted with their feet Telstra might wake up. They still see themselves as a monopoly and act accordingly. We are now seeing the result of poor policy- Telstra should have been split before privatisation. Mycelius | Brisbane - November 23, 2009, 6:56AM Paul, like you after more than 20 years with telstra frustrated, angered I left to go to Optus. It is sad to see the demise of a great company an Australian Icon. Customer rarely complain they simply don't come back. I complained and went to the ombodsman. My father was criticlally ill in hospital. I had a call from the cardiologist and my mobile was cut-off shortly after. I paid my bill the same day and was told it would be connected within 24 hours. It was not connected 4 days later. Enough was enough and I changed to Vodofone. If I happen to miss paying a bill, Vodeofone have the courtesy of allowing incoming calls. Also I am not on a plan I use pre-pay. My bills with telstra were all over the place. That's why I missed paying a bill because I was on a monthly plan of $40.00 and had a bill of $700.00 and couldn't get it itemised. When I withdraw they wanted to charge $300.00 otherwise I could not take my mobile number which I had for 8 years to another provider. At that point I went to the ombudsman and minister. I set up a new phone number at great inconvenience, and after 3 months they withdrew the charges. peterr | Canberra - November 23, 2009, 7:05AM I've been going through exactly the same dramas. Ever since I changed my billing arrangements in response to their ridiculous new charge, Telstra has been sending me Overdue notices. Every month, after shuffling back and forth between Billing and Direct Debit depts, the problem seems sorted but every month a new Overdue notice arrives. Despite their assurances to the contrary this week, next month I fully expect another Overdue notice and brace for the moment when they cut off my wireless broadband without warning. I am also a Mac user and when I asked when Telstra's wireless broadband would work with Snow Leopard, the new Mac OSX Operating System which Apple made available to Telstra 10 months before public release, I received an email from customer support that said "We have not been informed when we will support this product". I asked whether he'd be satisfied with this response if he were a customer and concluded then, as now, with, "And you wonder why people hate Telstra?". Allen Palmer | Alexandria - November 23, 2009, 7:17AM Last week with no internet (yet again) I had the misfortune to have to ring technical support (I'm not sure why they call it that) and spoke to someone in India who took no notice when I said it was asking for a number to be put in and continued on asking me questions obviously from a manual and after he could not fix the problem offered to put me through to Gizmo - you have to pay for this technical support. He suggested the other option was to get a new wireless adaptor, which I found out would cost me $60. Another two phone calls later and I finally got onto someone in Australia. It took them less t
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Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
Anyone dumb enough to be on bigpond (in this country) gets what they deserve quite frankly and i wouldn't want one using linux, thats for sure...
however, to understand why bigpond will do something like this is quite simple. i've been on the inside and its not simply a case "ahh, here's a machine with a 2tb harddrive, we'll whack that over there and use that for our mirror", sorry they just dont "do" things that way. if they want to host files, its a tedious exercise. Combine high-powered server, custom-web-managed software with monitoring, san connectivity and then enterprise grade backup and the cost of doing anything in bigpond becomes astronomical. Not to mention you better pray you can get someone in their operations center to "support" the thing (i.e. keep it running and syncing from upstream). that is of course assuming you can even get such a project approved and off the ground in the first place. Keeping in mind, disk costs money for them (per gb) as most of the data hits "managed" storage.
Bigpond, technically a seperate entity from telstra, is one step away from one of the most useless companies in the world (i.e. telstra). They suck at everything and if you wanted to do something from within the organisation, theres a massive heirachy of people setup to stop you (irrelevant of the reasons you might be doing it) and if you still managed to get it done, you'll be looking at a 6month deployment and training (for operations) exercise.
to be honest, i find it amusing they are removing the mirrors cause typically that meant someone went out of their way to have them removed and rarely do people do something they're not required to do at bigpond. its very much a status-quo exercise in that company, i.e. dont touch it if you dont have to. But it is amusing to think that at some point, someone kicked off a cost-saving project that's probably been running for the last 12 months (with zero input from anyone technical) and finally got around to giving some recommendation based on (what was probably to begin with) a ridiculous set of requirements written up by someone who has very little idea about what a computer is. Thats the really sad part, alot of the happenings in that company (such as this) are controlled by people who seriously have no clue. even sader still is that whoever did this and was involved in the whole affair (and you can be sure there were many) was probably doing it just cause they needed something to bill time to (i.e. look busy). Yet, people inside the company cant understand why the company cant get its stock price up? seriously give me a break, there are sooo many superfluous people in both organisations that offer no real use in terms of what a business should be, its quite sickening.
Thats not to say removing linux mirrors on bigpond is a bad thing, i just mean its sterotypical for bigpond and telstra to do stupid things for stupid reasons. Im posting anon on this one for obvious reasons, me (and the company i work for) still have fairly strong ties to both telstra and bigpond.
I have been Telstra free for over 5 years now and what a relief. No more bullshit customer service, random charges, h/w and s/w lock down etc.
Telstra is just big by size and market penetration because it was the only telecom provide in old days. Now a days sensible people go for ISPs like IINET, Internode etc.
There is a very good reason he posts as AC (I bet MSCE) and another good reason that Slashdot doesn't even bother alerting about AC replies.
Just tell one sentence to them: Internet was built on UNIX.
I admit you can go really advanced with Windows based servers but it doesn't change that Windows is also responsible for letting such low IQ idiots into serving business.
We see the results every single fscking day.
Switching ISP does not fix physical layer problems.
A few days ago the government paid Telstra $11B
The Government has not paid Telstra a cent. They have agreed to make payments progressively as the network is built.
and (believe it or not) to compensate them for the future loss of customers. That's right.
No, it is not right. The payment is to convince them to migrate their customers onto the new network. They don't lose any customers - they will still be the retailer for anyone who chooses to stay with them.
I hate Telstra and can't wait to leave them, but the government is actually using my tax dollars to compensate a company for losing my business through their own sheer ineptitude.
It doesn't surprise me that you're angry, considering that you don't understand the situation at all.
The Government is using your tax dollars to build a superior network. Buying Telstra's support makes it more cost effective. If you're happy being stuck on copper forever, then good for you. The rest of us actually want to see some progress.
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