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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."

6 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. TPG has the best plans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:TPG has the best plans by Jelly2003 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I signed my dad up to TPG for his home and his office, thus far they seem to be pretty good, fast connection. They lack unmetered content, but make up for it with unmetered uploads and high download quotas. Their tech support is pretty good too but I called them a couple of times and they were closed.

      My favourite ISP is Intenode, they're a little more expensive because they've kept their main focus on providing internet, rather than forcing landline / mobile phone packages down people's throats. Also, on most plans they don't meter uploads.

      Also their unmetered content is great:
      * HUGE FTP file mirror with tons of open source and Linux / BSD / Solaris distros
      * MajorGeeks mirror
      * SourceForge mirror
      * Steam mirrors
      * ABC IVIEW
      * They repeat stacks of streaming radio streams
      * TiVO update / content mirrors
      * Games.on.net - game servers, file downloads, media downloads

      Also, their tech support is really good, all of it seems to be based in Australia, so easy to communicate with.

  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. "low popularity" - yea right. by Narcocide · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."

    1. Re:"low popularity" - yea right. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. The sad history of Australian Telecommunications by CuteSteveJobs · · Score: 5, Informative

    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