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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 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.
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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.
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!
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.
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!
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
Carriers in Australia can't, by law, implement time-charged local calls for residential customers. Business customers are another matter, though.
There was some talk a couple of years ago about Telstra implementing technology to tell the difference between a voice and a data call, and time charging data calls. Quite frightening, actually. Thankfully, nothing came of it.
Back on topic, this is excellent news, but it comes too late for the mobile phone system. Australia has three sets of GSM cell towers, one belonging to each carrier, due to exactly this kind of pig-headedness on Telstra's part.
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