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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.
It's not as if people are forced to stay with BigPond or anything.
It's not as if Bigpond let you get ADSL2+ with another ISP if you're on a RIM or an area that only has Telstra Cable.
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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.
Yes they do: Internode offers Telstra wholesale ADSL2+ where available.
I do believe they are the only ISP to do so.
It's not cheap, but you do get the best ISP in the country. Linux mirrors included.
How do I know? I am on ADSL2+ (17mbit sync) on a RIM off a Telstra-only exchange using Internode as ISP.
Nobody shuts down a mirror that isn't soaking up any bandwidth
Yes they do. The point of a mirror is to act as a local cache. You grab stuff from outside the network periodically and give users the opportunity to fetch it locally. If people are not downloading much from it, you're still fetching stuff remotely so it's costing you external bandwidth and time / effort / hardware to maintain it but not actually saving you anything, so you shut it down.
This exact sequence happened with the mirrors that the university computer society ran when I was a student. They ran a mirror for a load of *NIX distributions and various other things that were useful to students. I maintained it for a bit, looked at the number of users and the bandwidth and time taken to keep it up to date, and decided it wasn't worth the effort. Deleting it and bumping up the disk space allowed for the web proxy's cache saved us more bandwidth.
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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