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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."
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
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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.
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.