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Telstra Opening Network
News.com explains that Telstra, Australia's largest phone company is being forced to open their network to competitors.
The article explains that Telstra controls 99% of phone lines to Australian homes, and 75% of "the industry's sales", making them
ten times as large as their biggest rival. With any luck, prices of local calls will drop quite a bit - I hear
my .au friends complain about it all the time. I'm curious to hear
what our Australian readers have to think of this.
This is possibly the best idea i have heard all
:)
year.
- Jaymz, also pissed off with telstra
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
Yeah the other day my .com .net .org and .edu buddies were bitching about something or other.
God what a dork.
Note To Australians and Brits: I get free Local calls, but it doesn't matter as far as data transfer goes because of my $45 a month Cable Modem with no download charges.
I live in australia / the blue moutains and a LOCAL call to, say, katoomba which has the same area code (02-47xxxxxx) is actually what telstra call a timed local call. The same applys to penrith altho its strange.. on my phone bill they seem to decide which calls are timed and which are not for no apparent reason.
Here's an interesting thought -- Control of the telephone network by one company doesn't necessarrily have to be a bad thing...provided the people in control aren't a bunch of crooks out to milk every last penny they can from the customers, of course. Unfortunately, Telsta seems to be this kind of company, from what I've read here. :)
:) ..and it's been that way for years..Yes, this sort of situation is rare, but it _is_ an example of how localized monopolies don't have to be a bad thing.
:)
We've seen this sort of thing happen in America with cable TV providers, and local phone carriers..whenever "competition" is forced on any industry (versus natural competition), it only results in there being more companies that suck..It doesn't really fix anything, imho. Instead of having one company which sucks moderately, you'll have 3 or 4 which *all* suck severely.
Here's an example: USWest has a virtual monopoly over telephone service in southern Arizona. You basically have no choice in who you choose for phone service. However, its a friendly monopoly -- All calls within Tucson city limits are free, and unmetered -- I can call anywhere in town I want, for free, and stay on as long as I want..this includes my ISP's dialup.
Flame away, and scream bloody murder about how all monopolies are evil evil evil, and i'm unamerican and all that... (laugh) I'll continue to enjoy my $13.62/mo phone bill.
Bowie
Bowie J. Poag
Yes, but are you near one of the big cities or out in the sticks?
Bewdy, stone the bleedin' crows, you bonza ripper, fair suck of the sav, flammin' unreal and that's great mate :-)
TRANSLATION:
I highly approve of this development in Australian telecommunications.
Take a look at www.satnet.com.au
it's available along the east coast i think.
Austar is going to offer internet access on there satellite service soon (they have around 20Mbit to share).
Some markets are just much better served by monopolies, because there are all sorts of advantages in being one, so that they can produce services more cheaply. In those cases, you're left between a gov't monopoly, a regulated monopoly, or an unregulated monopoly. All can have their own problems. A gov't monopoly is more likely to make competition illegal and lengthen the time when it is a monopoly past when the market may have changed. A regulated monopoly is likely to "capture" the regulators, and become regulated to its own advantage rather than consumers. And an unregulated monopoly can have quite a lot of power for a private company.
Sorry, guys. You're just sponging.
Why should the people who use the PSTN as it was designed have to foot the bill for data users who keep a circuit nailed up for hours, days, weeks....
And: yes, this will help our 'net access a _lot_. Smart ISPs will be able to establish POPs in central offices and deploy xDSL and Etherloop technologies. But we'll never achieve US pricing because a much higher proportion of our traffic is international - 80%, I believe.
I have been in talks with several people about starting up a wireless telco using the ISM bands and getting approx. 1.6Mbps. Due to cost constraints i would expect the target market for this would be business customers, but I am curious to know what people (read business's) would expect to pay for such a service.
Actually DSL is available in Australia and companies in Melbourne and Sydney are using it. Telstra does not sell it directly as a service however. You need to buy their PAPL (Private Access Pair Line?) product, which from memory went for about $1800/year last I inquired. You can then purchase/lease your DSL modems and run your 2 - 8 Mbits over this.
You need to push to get this product however as I understand Telstra want to de-emphasise it. There are a number of ISPs in Melbourne who have accepted the higher rents in the city are cheaper than a Mbit leased line to the suburbs.
no text
the crack in tel$tra's monoply is starting to widen , now maybe some can give us the cheap net services most other countries get . i have to pay $45aus for 200 hours a month at 56k .because telstra owns the line the make so much money there is now incentive for them to bring new cheap technolgy
thats like over $50 us dollars
Do Not Read Burgatronics... It's Evil
Concidering that Telstra is owned by the federal government (if Harradine keeps out of it...), they should release the network to other telecommunication companies. Apart from the fact that it would create jobs, Telstra's service is pathetic. We waited 2 months to have our phone connected to our new house - even when we booked it 3 months in advance! (they forgot to put the cables past the house) Competition leads to cheaper calls, better service and more options. Bring it on!!
"Open Telstra's lines to the others and we all win!"
Well... Yes, it means the competition doesn't
have to lay their own infrastructure. Less waste.
But... Telstra laid this infrastructure. It's big.
Very expensive. They have to maintain it. They need to recoup both their investment in the first place
and their ongoing maintenance costs. Yet the regulatory authority tends to mandate cheap end user cost and unprohibitive access costs to the competition. I know if I were Telstra I'd be damn pissed about this situation.
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@cskk.id.au http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
We've got the same problem here in Canada. Bell Canada used to have a monopoly over all phone communications within our (HUGE) borders, but it was a Crown Corporation, which mean that the whole country got touchtone service at the same time. Since privatisation and deregulation, our costs have gone up (!), service has gone down (!!), and the people have gotten more pissed off.
And the crappiest thing is, thety've still got a monopoly on local lines, because we're in the centre-spot of the de-regulation timetable ! They know that they're about to lose the local monopoly too, so they SHOULD be being nicer and nicer, but no such luck...
I used to feel a little smug when speaking with my American friends (some of whom apparently STILL don't have touchtone-- yay free market telcos !), but there's less and less reason for smugness everyday.
I think you're right : Huge, sparsely populated countries are not good breeding grounds for free market telcos. We're disaster areas waiting to happen.
Jes
http://beoscentral.com
Telstra should be renamed Tel$cum IMO. Their service is shite, their charges are waaay to expensive, and they like to use antiquated technology. I Live in Adelaide, and they don't have cable *anywhere* near where I live, neither do Optus. We would have, but we had those bloody tree hugging hippies protesting they don't want overhead more cables. I'd couldn't give a rats ass about more cables, you don't notice them where they *ARE* unless you go looking for them. I want fucking cable at a cheap price!
Since the government has poured billions of taxpayers money into the network over the years when Tel$cum was a government entity, the government should retain ownership of the network, and license other telco's to use the network, then use the money from the licenses to maintain and upgrade it. Maybe then I could buy the line that runs into my property rather than paying the bastards rent for it! That really pisses me off that they own the line up to the first socket, which means they can come into my house, tear down the wall or rip up my garden, but at least they have to fix and pay for it.
Any self respecting Australian should either take up arms and shoot every director at Tel$cum or write to the government, Australian Communications Authority or Australian Competition And Consumer Commission or Telstra and voice their disgust at the monopoly and shithouse service we have to put up with from Telstra.
There are other options. Zip (www.zip.com.au)
have a direct satellite connection to the US
(5MBit) and you can get that for 14c/MB.
I think once Optus get their act together and
create some serious competition with the cable
modems the internet costs will drop across
the board. Telstra has a long history of keeping
prices as high as possible until they are
forced to price-cut due to competition.
Local calls here cost from 23-25 Australian cents per call, with no time limit. Telstra have tried to get calls timed but failed, it's political suicide for any Australian government. Current predictions have call charges falling to around 18 cents (some say 15) within two years. If Telstra is too awkward in the negotiations with C & W/Optus and the other competing groups, the head of the supervising body has threatened to take regulatory action. The introduction of competition into the international and national call market here has resulted in a HUGE drop in call rates over the past few years, it just goes to show how these guys were ripping us off before. I previously lived in Hong Kong for 17 years, and C&W had a cosy monopoly there until recently, they really milked the cow for all it was worth...
The moral? Get the maximum competition in ASAP and don't think that the telecommunications companies will do ANYTHING that will cut their profits unless compelled to do so.
Tony Page
Being an Australian with lots of bad experiences with Telstra, i'm not so certain this is a good idea. The idea of allowing competition on _telstras copper lines_ is good as far as price goes but very bad as far as data goes. I, and many of my friends have had consistant problems with telstra's phone lines not being able to connect at even 21600!! and telstra of course refuse to do anything because im not paying business rental rates.
By allowing all the phone companies around here to hop onto telstras lines removes the key reason why i switched to optus' local network, it wasnt saving 5c/call (although thats nice), it was the fact that i got a decent phone line that i could actually use. Allow everyone to use the same crap lines that have been there for decades and are maintained by a company that likes to halve its support staff every 6 months and you will get rid of this 'other option' that I and many others have taken. All competition does is allow telstra to slash even more staff and lower service standards to new lows, from a net connection point of view. The ACCC really need to kick telstra up the arse in regards to their net service, a cable modem in Australia costs at the lowest $70 and you have a 100mb download cap and 35c/mb thereafter. Telstra need to flesh out a peering agreement with the backbones in the US so they aren't paying by the Mb and hence passing it on 10 fold to the rest of us.
They know how to play the game, all they do is keep the level of service hovering in the region just above getting so bad that people will go throught the tortures and inconvenience of changing providers.
Telstra make a mint out of the mobile market and don't give a shit about anything else now.
About time others were allowed fair access.
-- Rich
For the longest time, Telstra (formerly Telecom Australia) was government owned, and had a monopoly on local and overseas/mobile calls. A few years back, overseas/mobile calls were deregulated (well, duopolied) and prices went down a bit. Now, part of Telstra's been floated, everything's been opened up, and we're only starting to reap the benefits of competitive overseas prices. Local calls have remained fixed.
Telstra were talking about changing over to untimed calls a while back, that they claimed would actually be cheaper for the average local call (5 minutes) - obviously concerned by people spending hours on a 25c data call. This will put the brakes on that idea, based on what happened with international calls (and rightly so).
Programming is 1% inspiration, and 99% plagiarism.
Finally Australia might get access to DSL services (from someone other than Telstra) to help our lethargic Internet access get from dial up speeds or extremely expensive ISDN to something with some real bandwidth and reasonable cost. Telstra have sat on the publicly owned copper pair resources for 20 years denying all access except themselves. All is not sweetness and light yet though, Australia does not yet have ACA Technical Standards to test DSL modems against and Telstra sits on the standards writing committee??
If you want to read my submission on the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission inquiry (from 20 years in the modem industry in Australia) visit http://www.ridge.com.au/acctdres.html
>to AD it's still alot cheaper.
Compared to the US it probably is. Compared to the UK it is a lot cheaper. I lived in OZ between '75 and '86 and I still find it incredible that you could talk to someone all day for 20c (at the time ).
Similar thing happend in sweden a couple years ago, things have sertanly improved. Rates dived like monkeys of a burning swing. At least for long distance, sweden is just a big local-tax- zone now. Internet comes at local-tax without any subscription-fee(still has a way to go).
FRA: STFU GTFO
Well you could move across the Tasman, and get free local calls. Not untimed, free. Unlimited ISP connection to one of the big boys is NZ$39.99 per month.
Every time I spent time in Oz, I particularly remember the poor quality service of Telstra.
Where I was living, telecom were offering xDSL for NZ$79 per month, and that included the connection to their ISP. Plus, initially (now dropped) you could have a couple of tv channels too.
From what I remember, Telecom NZ is quite keen to get in there. While their business practices leave something to be desired, they do offer a pretty good service.
Problem.
As far as I can tell, the whole 'we own the pipes, you rent the usage' idea can't work for anything but data. Say some big company owns all the powerlines in your area, but allows you to choose who's power you use. So you use 120KWh of electricity, and your supplier puts in 120KWh of electricity. But how do you know you got your supplier's electricity, and not someone elses? If somebody elses supplier starts putting fluctuations into the lines, you start getting fluctuations, even though it's not your supplier. How do things like that work?
Data, is different, as it can be packeted and seperated, ID'd and tracked. So you can mix it in the pipes, and it's all OK.
But Telstra will never do that. Even though the ACCC has now mandated that they open up their lines, did you notice how they're already stalling? Telstra's damn good at that, and has been doing it for ages on other matters (Like the ISP charging thang)
Telstra used to be good, and had some damn funky research labs.
Pity. But that's nostalgia really.
You may be able to get compensation for this. They have some policy where the have to pay you so many dollars a day if you dont have service/whatever.
;-)
We ordered a second line for the modem and the guy didn't show up on the day and when it was finally put on it didn't work cause they didn't connected it properly in the exchange. 3 months later it was finally working and they sent us the bill for a couple of hundred dollars!!!
So we complained and they gave us $930.00 of credit!!!!
Now thats alot of local calls
Am I the only one who's noticed that SlashDot is completely dominated by corporate news these days? Look at the articles posted here today, for example:
1) QNX
2) NSI
3) AOL/Sun/Netscape
4) Game Consoles (Sony/Nintendo,...)
5) AOL
6) Telstra
7) Westwood
8) USPS
9) Perl (finally!)
10) WalMart
Boring.
One, or arguably 2 articles out of 10 dealing with something *other* than what the corporations are up to. What I want to know about is what *we* up to -- where are the stories about the latest developments in free software projects like GNOME or KDE, etc. I'm sick of seeing stories about the latest IPO from some tech-related corporation. I want "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", not news for businessmen.
A disgruntled long-time fan of Slashdot.
...because Telstra's reputation is skating on thin ice as it is, as far as I'm concerned...
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
Online services industry.
Having the extra competition is going to be a great thing for Australians, who up until now have had little competition in the local call market, and not a great deal more in long distance. About the only thing that has seriously challenged the (few) telcos in Australia is various online service providers introducing Voice Over IP communications, such as OzEmail Phone, which I often use myself.
My concern is that Telstra's provision of services to third parties to resell will result in a great degradation of service for those wishing to use phone lines for data services.
At present Telstra's PSTN network in certain suburban and country areas uses compression of voice channels when in peak usage periods in order to avoid rolling out new equipment to increase the base capacity. eg. if each street block has a 2Mbps pipe to the Telstra network, two blocks may have only 3Mbps between them, One each and one shared between them. In peak periods when this overlap is required by both blocks the Big Box on the corner starts chopping off bits and pieces to fit it all through. While this doesn't seriously degrade a voice call this is guaranteed to destroy any attempt a modem will have to communicate with the outside world.
If Telstra starts selling of its already obviously limited bandwidth, where then is the consumer left who wishes to get online? This is obviously something that must be done in order to open up the market, but in the interim how much will Joe Net-User suffer?
I say I ain't giving you no tree fiddy you goddamned Loch Ness monster, get yo own goddamned money!
Rumour has it that Optus cable will be introduced in the near future, and yes it will be unlimited downloads/time. Apparently it will be available for a reasonable price of $40/month.
-Bruce
Telstra still has control over what equipment is hooked up to thier network. All modems need Telsra approval before they can be used in Aus for example. They will leverage this control to maintain their monopoly.
I have heard that Telstra is dropping the prices or Cable Internet. I don't know how much cheaper it will be, but it will be sometime in the next few months.
This is a test. I am writing this in an article that has long since disappeared off the main page. Hope it doesn't offend anyone.
fuck,bitch,ass,crap,shit,whore.
If the above is blank, slashdot has implimented a "cursing" filter. Foo.
--
Well, the picture in Argentina is not so different (I always though that AU and AR are VERY similar in many social aspects). Here we have not one but 2 companies that control 49,5% of the market each, they have the SAME prices. So, let's say you want to build a ISP. You have a US$1000/month fee for a 64-128Kb line, but both telco have their own ISP (no real money is moved). So, how you compete?
New companies are expected to start giving services by the end of the year, and I'm SURE that they will display similar prices to the current monopolies. Competition? No, nobody want's to screw up the big communications bussiness. They are all friends, they like what they have and will never risk it so nobody is going to really lower prices.
First, electricity is fungible. If several generators are putting watts and VARS (volt-amperes reactive... don't ask!) into the network, and several consumers are taking them out, it's not possible to tell which consumer got which supplier's W/VAR. There are some effects where adding power at one point versus another will change the losses in transmission equipment in the network, but these are relatively small.
What you can tell is that, over a period from T0 to T1, producer A added X amount of KWH to the network, and producer B added Y amount. Over this same time period, producer A's customers consumed X' KWH, producer B's consumed Y' KWH, and some quantity Z went to losses. If you use electronically-polled meters (the part I was involved with), you can make the interval from T0 to T1 almost as short as you'd like, as in hours or minutes. This allows producer B to get paid spot-price for producer A's generation shortfalls, and vice versa. That is the only reason you'd care about whose customers consumed what.
If someone is putting spikes and such onto the network, they may get disconnected. Power companies (in the USA) will put line monitors and such in your neighborhood if you are having quality-of-service problems, and either fix the offender (if it's in the network) or force it to be fixed (if it's a customer's). As long as only one entity owns the local transmission network, you still have one point of contact for such problems.BT charges per minute. This must have cost Britain an entire industry.
Wish they'd make they're damn cable modem service, "Advanced" cheaper. $60 for 100mb a month + $400 odd for the modem, I think not....
This is very good, but not there yet. I live just outside of Washington DC, and I still have only one company that I can pay for local phone service. To be honest I would pay more to get Bell out of the loop. Bring on the competition!!!!!
Fiid - Ryhmes with Squid. Software Engineer
But for like 3 USD a month I get my first 100 some odd local phonecalls for freee, and then .07 USD a call afterwards, even when converting it to AD it's still alot cheaper.
Its not Telestra, its Telstra.
Also, they charge 25cents for an untimed local call, which is not that expensive. C&W Optus have local phone lines available to around 2.2 million people in Sydney (dunno 'bout other capital cities/states), and that costs 20cents per untimed local call.
Posted by Synsthe:
Would somebody actually spell it right for once? =) It's Telstra, not Telestra
http://www.telstra.com.au/
--
Mark Waterous (mark@projectlinux.org)
Well it's about time. I don't really care about local call charges but this may finally put pressure on them with regard to data comms costs. At the moment we pay our isp his cut and then we pay telstra for isdn rental, now admitedly the cost is coming down but it used to be that you paid almost as much to telstra as you did to the isp.
The other problem is that telstra is a fair weather company, when things are going ok there pretty good but as soon as a problem hits they don't want to know, and it's a bit hard to go to the opposition when there really isn't one.
We have a good uptake of technology here and while the mobile and other comm's stuff has taken off pretty well, the telstra monopoly tends to stagnate the growth in the other areas. I think this can only be a good thing.
Where I live there is no choice but to go with Telstra and I've had modem disconnection problems continuously with their lines. At one stage it took more than 5 callouts and a modem connection at 2400bps with error-checking off before they even acknowledged that there was a problem.
Some competition is well overdue...
Firstly it's TELSTRA, not TELESTRA!!!!
Secondly, Telstra over the last few years of partial deregulation and privatisation has gone from a bunch of monopolistic bastards who at least had a network that worked and provided universal service throughout Australia (no mean feat given how large and sparsely-populated the Australian inland is) to a bunch of quasi-monopolistic even bigger bastards whose service record has gone down the tube from cost cutting and in particular have drastically reduced their service standards in the bush.
AFAIC at present we have the worst of both worlds: Telstra is quasi-privatised and hence no longer can have social obligations (like equality of service across the country) as easily forced on it by the government, while the competition is too weak to impose the disciplines of the market. Yes, we need more competition, but whether that will fix the service standards in the bush is another matter; the competition is going to all be in the big coastal cities where you can make money. Frankly for huge, sparsely populated countries like Australia or Canada (or Russia?) I'm dubious about whether privatisation/deregulation is an appropriate means of providing universal service.
Now, if only the ACCC would stop Telstra screwing everyone for IP traffic. They are charged nothing from MCI, but charge everybody else 19c/Mb incoming, 8c/Mb outgoing traffic. This means for most ISP's that the money they get from customers goes straight to Telstra - in one hand & out the other. Telstra also run a competing ISP business, BigPond, which I doubt they charge for traffic.
(or if they do, its a token accounting book shift of funds that means nothing in real money). ISP's are forced to go throgh Telstra as it's the only provider worth a damn.
People think Microsoft have a monopoly, they're nothing compared to Telstra.
That being said, their level of service is pretty good and their tech support are excellent (perhaps the telephone side of Telstra could learn from the Internet side here). I think my major complaint really is that they invented ISDN, yet they resell it here so @#$#@$ expensive yet the bloody yanks get it for next to nix. Should be the other way 'round.
Matt
Where I live there is no choice but to go with Telstra and I've had modem disconnection problems continuously with their lines. At one stage it took more than 5 callouts and a modem connection at 2400bps with error-checking off before they even acknowledged that there was a problem.
Some competition is well overdue...
Communication monopolies are no longer acceptable. It simply does not
require much technology to move a little noise from one place to
another. It takes only slightly more technology to move data. Each
day wasted allowing some miserable monopoly to take profits and
control access is another wasted day.
At this point, I am willing to consider any alternative to my local
phone and cable company. The place I live is populated by _only_
130,000 people. As a result, neither the phone company or the cable
company consider it profitable to provide more than voice media to
myself and the other customers living here.
I would feel privileged to pay $150 per month for continuous broadband
access. Unfortunatly, people like myself are shut out because the
bureaucratic monopolies can not see a means by which to profit from
this. I am certain that given the opportunity, smaller more efficient
providers could _earn_ enormous profits from people like myself.
Until the Telstra's of the world are set back on their heals and told
to start earning their revenue, nothing will change. I for one feel
no hesitation. Monopolies _always_ breed mediocrity and waste. For
whatever benevolence these institutions have shown, they have been
compensated lavishly. Now is the time for change, progress and
bandwidth.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Bring on the competition!!!!!
I don't live in Australia, but I have this thing that competition is good, and I like it. I mean, who wants one big moron controlling everything?
Insert mind here.
Hopefully this means that 'real bandwidth' will become available.
After all, when the same company controls ~99% of the local loop cabling, is the largest ISP (BigPond), supplies >70% data comms, and owns >70% of the pipes going overseas, how much do you think they will innovate.
OnRamp ISDN is still ~AU$1000 installation + AU$300/mth.
Thats a single B channel. Dont even get me started on the reliability of their services. Oh, and this is the corporation that because 49% is owned by public shareholders (thanks to our idiotic government -- other 51% still govt owned), has a 'responsibility' to gouge it's customers to keep said shareholders happy.
Can you say horizontal and vertical monopoly? Telstra are Australia's own little MS (and are seriously in bed with them).
I personally think they *should* have kept the local loop as a separate organisation, and have it lease access to other carriers.
Mind you, even with all of my rabid dislike for them, they still keep my mobile phone business (decent coverage).
HTH
Daniel
Posted by Justin:
:) i double-checked the news.com story, and the headline said ``telestra'' (even though the rest of the article doesn't.
yes, it was my mistake. i initially thought it was telstra, as i'd seen all the australians i know type it that way
sorry.
In the local call market here in Australia, I honestly believe that price is not the issue. We get local calls for a flat 25c. That means that a 10 hour call to your ISP costs a total of 25c.
However, the moment that you move to data, you get slugged. For a 64k ISDN channel, expect to pay $140 per month rental, plus $135 per month capped call costs. It is vastly cheaper to get an extra phone line and use multilink ppp, but somehow the phone companies here just don't get it.
The other area where Telstra fall down is service. Put simply, it is appalling. I wanted my phone service modified - move the connection point on the house and add an extra outlet. The Telstra service guy didn't turn up on the day, even though they had two months notice. Then when he finally did turn up, he disconnected my monitored alarm service because he didn't know what it was.
If I had a choice of local carrier I'd switch in an instant.
Telstra currently owns the infrastructure and at the same time is the largest user of that infrastructure. Anyone who wanted to compete with them would have two choices: pay billions of dollars to set up a competing infrastructure, or pay through the nose to telstra to use their wire. That's where the problem lies - Telstra has control of the thing that everyone needs to provide their service.
What really has to happen is something along these lines: The part of Telstra that maintains the actual infrastructure has to be broken away from Telstra the service provider. The service provider side can be sold to the highest bidder, funding whatever our current bloody stupid govt. wants today. The infrastructure side really must stay in public hands - that way it's possible for them to be forced to give a certain level of service everywhere, be it the capital cities or some outstation in Arnhem Land.
If Telstra is privatised, or is forced to compete as it is, then those expensive, non-profitable services will get dropped. They are simply too expensive for a commercial entity to support, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to (hey, it's not real competition if you handicap one player). Asking Telstra to be both commercially competitive and to provide (much needed but) expensive, unprofitable services is ridiculous.
So break them up. It would give us Australian taxpayers some certainty in the services provided us (because of the govt. control of the infrastructure), and it would allow real competition on a completely level playing field (apologies for the cliche). And the govt. could still rake in masses of cash from charging the telco's for using their wires . . . I think it'd be a win-win situation, but even if it set Telstra the company back it'd be way better for the country, and that's far more important.
My 2% of a Universal Currency Unit . . .
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Hopefully this will force them to open up to competition a bit more - when I moved to Optus about a year ago they wouldn't allow you to keep your old number, although it was technically possible.
Unfortunately because of this almost-monopoly, the fastest net connection available to most people is still about 40k on a 56k modem (if you're lucky enough to have a decent phone line) - Telstra is still the only cable modem provider (with very high prices), ISDN is even worse, and both of these are only available in some major cities...
--
--
We apologise for the inconvenience.
I am paying ~$2,000 a year ($170/month) for their cable service. It delivers well over 1Mbps and I get 500mb free a month. After that it is around 21c per megabyte. I only pay downstream, as well. I have no bitches whatsoever about that.
Bring it on. the more competition the better.
A personal hope is that CWO (Cable and Wireless Optus) provide competative rates for cable modem access. Currently you pay $80 a month for a mere 200mb of data.
You would hope that the competition would lower this to $80 for unlimited downloading or better.
DSL is also scheduled for trialing in Australia over the next 18 months
Zionite
That sounds very similar to what is being done with the electricity grid in some states over east. It sounds like a great idea, since it dramatically reduces the cost of entry to the market, and you don't have to worry about the established monopoly not letting others in.
Why should two people who have the same piece of copper running to their house pay radically different amounts depending on how many times a day/how long it carries data?
It costs the telco just as much money to fix a noise problem for a user who makes one call a week as for one who is on the line 24/7. The copper costs the same. The only difference is in the capacity cost of the switch, and that's just a computer. You know, those things which have been doubling their capacity/cost every 18 months for the last 15 years? At this time, the switch is so cheap that charging for usage has no economic basis whatsoever.
You are kidding ?
There are *only* seven million people is CH. 18 in Australia. and the Country is 50 times bigger ( bigger = MUCH higher Transmission and Infrastructure costs).
I'm Australian. Living in Switzerland, And I used to work for Optus. ( Australia # 2 carrier) I have worked in Europe ( switzerland isn't part of euroland is it ? ) and Swiss for diAx ( The # 2 Mobile carrier ).
The reason Switzerland does not have competive prising is the same reason that Australia has poor effective competition. Swisscom ( think Telstra ) has an almost complete monopoly of direct connect ( copper ) throughout the country. And they are not letting go.
By freeing up the competition, in Oz and giving the other carriers access will enable price savings for the smaller carriers. ( currently Telstra charged 8 c ( 7.995 rappen ) for a connection leg ( AT EACH END) which makes a local service for a pre-selected customer cost 16 cents for Optus. If the calls cost 20. cents Optus is only making 4 cents on a preselected local call. Why would they bother ?. Bearing in mind they have to bill the customer and THEN pay telstra for the right to use the Governments Copper.
Price fixing in most indutries by Cartels in Switzerland is the biggest ( and least talked about ) problem in this/your country. Prices will never change while they are not truely subject to market forces and demands. And controlled by the group of comapanies ( or monopolies ) that control these services.
Etc etc etc etc.
mroeder
My father (an old radio/comms hacker from the valve
...
era) tells me that telecom (what telstra *used* to be
called) was a good telco.
Essentially, it was set up to provide universal phone
access within Australia, for a low price. The engineers
ran the show, top to bottom. They had to, to do what
they did.
Telstra/telecom has deployed what is possibly *the* most
advanced integrated phone network of its size anywhere
in the world. To do that cost the Australian people many
billions of dollars.
So why, may I ask, is it considered Telstra's sole
property?
Here's what *ought* to happen:
Keep the hardware. Sell Telstra. Set up a bandwidth
market, where telcos can buy and sell the capacity that
is available. Some of the money on these bandwidth bonds
can then be put towards new hardware.
That way:
1) No free lunch for Telstra. We The People keep
what we payed for.
2) The network is still run by engineers, not
MS-wannabes.
3) Telstra competes on a level field with everyone
else.
Here's to dreaming
JC.
-- The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the fictional entity who may or may not have expressed them
As a communications specialist, I've seen all sides of Telstra's network, and it's NOT a pretty sight. Personally, I think the whole customer wiring side (termination in a business premesis) needs to be scrapped and replaced in most buildings. Some of it is well over 50 years old, and still in use.
This equipment (anything over 5 years old) was installed by Telstra (or Telecom as it was known) and most of it is just plain shocking. To expect anyone to actually figure out the junk they have installed, and connect your service without destroying some other service at the same time, is just asking for trouble. At a guess, over one tenth of all new installs do not work first time, or upset someone elses service.
Telstra's backbone however is quite nice, and the street wiring is improving. There is still a lot of crud out there, that will not be replaced unless we go fibre, or until it fails (of course).
ISDN is still overpriced here, although the prices are going down, they are no where near as good as they could be. Installation costs are just plain terrible. Leased lines are also way overboard. These are just some of the reasons a lot of companies are looking heavily into Wireless Technology, especially if they have large operations that are not too distantly seperated.
Telstra are also our biggest ISP, and they charge for bandwidth like a wounded bull. At 18 cents per megabyte (or 9 cents per megabyte you SEND, if your incoming bandwidth is less than one tenth (aproxx) of your outgoing bandwidth usage) you damn well expect good service, right? Wrong, unfortunately. The Telstra international link(s) have had packet losses of over 40% on AVERAGE for the last 3 years.
It's a step forward, but personally, I'm worried about the two steps backwards me might be taking elsewhere.
Forgotten my password - Bugger!
Well in Brisbane at least, C & W Optus are starting to offer local calls.
The big news I'm waiting for though, is affordable high bandwidth internet access. However, I feel this may be some time coming...
David de Groot Snr Systems Engineer
Au contraire my friend. Canada, since it is opened to competition, is know to be the country where phone services are the lowest priced. Bell Canada was our monopoly. There are so many competing companies now that some companies have started to offer free internationnal calls at certain hours. I'm not informed about buisness rates but they are sure to be low too. I curenly pay a fixed fee of 15(Canadian)$ for unlimited usage with no "per call" shit. But then again, we north americans would start to riot if someone tried that shit on us ;-)
This might seem a good thing for consumers but Telstra is still mostly owned by the government. It provides an incredible amount of income for them. If they are opened up to competition and forced to lower prices, profits will fall and less money will flow through to the government. The government needs this money and the only way they are going to get it is to increase taxes.
seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place.
When telstra was a monopoly, it was 100% government owned.
Being government owned, it did not make profits as big as it does now.. The company often had to provide services that resulted in very low profit margins, particularly for services that were provided for the rural and outback of australia.
Low profits from the rural australia didn't matter to Telstra as much as the extra votes the government would get in favor during the next election! Usually, the extended coverage and affordable costs kept the voters happy..
Since telstra has recently started to privatize, there is growing fear that competition might actually be bad..
To compete successfully with other tel-co's, telstra would have to cut back on spending on those low profit margin services, and divert the funds to more needed paces so that they could be used to curb competition.
In this case, telstra might cut spending on the rural / outback service, in order to to decrease the cost of a local urban call, so that it would match the competition.
As for now, competition is mainly in urban areas
Luckily, telstra still remains 50% government owned, so that low profit services can still operate.. Recently 400 million dollars has been set aside for telstra to install the CDMA cell phone network. Why CDMA? I don't know.. we already have a GSM network covering over 90% of the population... I guess the farmers have been complaining again..
Australia's biggest IT news website, FairfaxIT, has more info, here:
Telstra own the copper wire that goes to everyone's home. They have invested heavily in ISDN for which they charge _lots_ of money (like $1000 connection + $300/month for 64kbps!)... (you're ISP connections are on top of this!)
Up until now it has been against the law (like with jail/large fine penalties) for connecting "non-telstra-approved" equipment to the wiring.
Given that there was so much invested in ISDN, Telstra has not been willing to put in place DSL technology - hence it is impossible to get > 56kbps internet connectivity (except in some small areas of Sydney and Melbourne where Cable network access has been installed (and I'm in Perth 8-( )....
The only reason that DSL has not been available is because Telstra has not allowed it - so that they can continue to charge lots of $$$ for ISDN connections...
In all seriousness, my company (with a building containing > 40 people has it's only internet connection via a 33kbps pipe (and don't you think _that_ is slow!!! (Practically Impossible to download anything > 50-100k)
This is because it's all that is available - even then it costs about $300/month for this permanent link!...
I say, yippee!! for the access to the local loop... I am hanging out for the 1-2mbps download speeds that until now have been in my sweet dreams....
Anyway, that's my $0.02 worth...
from An Aussie...
David Buddrige
http://www.q-net.net.au/~buddrige
I heard/read somewhere that Satellite internet connectivity wasn't that hard to get in Aust.
For something like $600/setup, and $60/month you can get a decent downlink (not uplink, still have to battle the phone line for uplink) with just a 90cm dish. I heard that the speed was something like 300kb/sec, but going as high as 4.5Mbps for a 2.4 meter dish (expensive, v. v. expensive)
I'm not sure how accurate this is, does anyone have any idea?
Steve
sjthorne@ozemail.com.au
This will be a good chance for new
carriers like Jtel to become
established.
personally I think telstra should go back to being a public asset. At least then Telstra didn't boast of 3.x Billion dollar profits one week, and then the next sack 2000 workers. (making customer service a thing for the history books).
I also believe that what Telstra thinks are it's assets, infact belong to every Australian since our taxes paid for it all in the first place.
As far as I can tell (and other Australians might be able to prove me wrong here) when Telstra was Telecom it wasn't a company (no ACN number?), in fact it's my opion it was an agency and didn't act as an individual.
Government agencys as far as I know don't own the assets their allocated, those infact belong to us the public. Therefore i don't see how telstra can claim to own that which is owned by the Australian Tax Payers, and as far as I'm concerned Telstra should be bought back and a system introduced so that telstra only breaks even, Public owned utilites/assests aren't meant to make huge profits their there to provide a service which is needed.
comments??
Matt
compare US vs AUS
AUS: 1Mb frame or DDS link: $AU18,000 per year + $0.19 per meg (carrier and data)
US: 1.5MB ADSL: $US60 per month unlimited traffic
OK I'll admit this is not available to all of the US but the AUS 1MB frame is only available within 12Km of the POP (i.e. CBD of Aussie cities) outside of this you only get some expensive ISDN and some unreliable PSTN
shit!
While I agree that Telstra ISP traffic service is absolutely disgusting. Their local call service is quite good.
The real problem with opening up the Telstra to other companies is that it is not longer cost effective to provide even basic services to outback communities. So what will happen is all these new companies will start up in the coastal cities, but no company will start or expand to outback communities (they simply will not be able to make money in the outback). So in effect you will divide the country in to the information rich cities and the infomation starved outback who can't even get a telephone line installed.
Now Australia is a primary producer the outback provide an incredibly rich source of revenue, but it is has a very low population and sometime there are many hundreds of km's between properties. The government use to force Telstra to provide telecommunications to these properties at comparable price to the cities. This will no longer happen and it will kill the outback. And then Australia will lose a major soruce of exports and the whole of Australia will be worse off.
Therefore it is a bad idea. Not that I like monopolies but it is the only way to provide a sustainable service to everyone in Australia.
I live in Switzerland and it's quite funny for me to see that in such a big country like Australia you NEED competition: here, we actually have too many telecom companies and Switzerland isn't so big ... the problem is that prices are always the same! Competiotn doesn't always work, at least in some parts of Europe.
Sorry, pressed the submit button too fast ..
It's as bad as everyone is saying - telstra blows.
I live in the biggest non-capital city in australia, and I can't even get cable access. Even if I could, it would cost me $540 to install, and then $90/month. Every Mb over the limit of 200 is 33cents. Its not exactly what I'd call affordable.
It really shits me when I hear every day about these peeps in the US with xDSL, cable, or faster, whereas I have to dial up on a fucking modem. I wonder why everything with computers is getting bigger better and faster, yet I am still stuck on the same crappy analogue line I was on years ago.
They are *such* a monopoly - I've read many articles on how they are frequently going out of their way to crush smaller companies who try to offer competition. I can't believe this has gone on so long... I sure hope this helps to change something.
nick