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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. 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.
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
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.
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?
capitalism is grand. king quarter. year over year increase or die at home crying.
Yeap, and even though it is clear that this service has been removed from paying customers for a few reasons, you have still been modded troll for pointing out the truth.
But that seems to be a philosophical underpinning of capitalism: bullshit people, because you can get more money off them if you get away with it. So those who point out the truth, no matter how abrasively, are attacked.
BigPond say they are cutting the service "due to low levels of general usage and limited appeal to a mainstream audience." But it boils down to money. They think they can get rid of that service because the number of people that use it aren't significant enough to kick up a fuss, or if they do, BigPond (now a bit SmallerPond) has decided that it can afford to lose those customers.
There is also their desire to profit off data transfers. Clearly the projected profits based on making people pay for data by selling services with stupidly low transfer limits, weren't the same as the real profits. People found a way to manage their limit, so BigPond are closing the loophole.
And the way they have gone about shutting it down also seems pretty shitty - announce the closure 5 days before hand, on a Friday. Many people won't find out until Monday, many will never even hear about the closure, and the site will just vanish.
But customers of BigPond, you have 4 days of being able to bring BigPond to their knees. This service doesn't count towards the pitiful downloads limit they provide:
(shame, it doesn't appear you can recursively do downloads if you save the output to /dev/null).
Car analogies break down.
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$
Parent is not really a troll. BigSwamp users are divided between people who don't know any better, and people who don't have a choice.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
"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.
I'll second that, OP is not a troll just an uncomfortable truth.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Is that jealousy I hear? Its good on this side of the fence mate, nobody tries to cheat me out of anything :)
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.
Spot on. .au users; set up your own bit-torrent based mirrors, but don't stop there; set up some other alternative service too; so that you are less tied to that supplier.
Use the problem as a stimulous to set yourselves and others free from idiot suppliers.
They'll soon come running back begging you to enslave yourselves again when they realise what you are doing.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
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.
Spot on. .au users; set up your own bit-torrent based mirrors
Uhh no. Bigpond have monthly data quotas, which count both downloads AND uploads. Their mirror didn't count towards that quota. So you want bigpond users to replace a quota-free mirror with a torrent that they not only have to pay for download traffic, but upload traffic too?
Much easier to move to a decent ISP, like Internode.
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.
now, *this* one should be marked as troll, and the OP is just a sad truth
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.)
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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