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Australia's Largest ISP Ditches Linux Mirror

Posted by timothy on from the this-is-our-business-model dept.

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."

3 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Move to another ISP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This only applies if you are willing to stay on dial up or you are in a heavily populated area. If you are in rural Australia your options tend to be limited to Telstra BigPond for broadband or you stay with narrowband services.

  2. They sucked. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Bigpond is part of Telstra by dbIII · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.