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Charging for Cable Internet Access in Australia
Anonymous Coward writes "Australian Cable Internet users suffered another major drawback yesterday, with simple services such as E-mail and Newsgroups being charged on a per megabyte basis. This practise is ludicrous as a client can now be charged for spam.
Previously, traffic from one cable modem to another was free, yet Telstra have amended their terms and conditions without user consent to include cable modem traffic. In fact, any traffic will be now charged on a per megabyte basis. So angry is the cable community, that it has made headines in Australian news.
"
There's one thing stopping the internet in this country, The Government.
Right now in sydney the situation constists of about 1000 dialup isps and 1 consumer high bandwidth isp. While the Infastructure is in place for high bandwidth big buisness aint letting it
Some history about the infastructure's history:
When australia recived Cable TV back in '95, it's a shock going from 50 stations to 5. There were 2 companies, one the government owned phone company, Telstra and Optus. Due to some arcane planning both companies decided to lay there own cable instead of sharing the costs involved in deploying the infastructure. The end result is that some of sydney is covered by both companies, while other parts have only coverage for one and some are without coverage.
And now the govenment has sold off about 1/2 of telstra, when the should have sold all of it yet repurchased the infastructure thus allowing them to lease the infatructure and keeping the competition around for customers.
From personal experience, its outrageous that my neighbors 2 doors from me can get cable and connect at 50kbps while my max connection is 31.2kbps. While in the country everyone is gaurnteed 56k while we get stuck with shit
If the government wanted to show it's doing something for the country and the internet it should lay the infastructure and stop dicking around with content laws until everyone has DECENT net access. /Rant
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Let's simplify things. How about: I think one of the moderation things options should be "SIG".
But would that be positive points for a particularly funny sig, negative points for spam in the sig, or one that uses no points because the comment has a sig?
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Probably came from Tasy Drakes Cakes, or some other god awful fat and calorie laden snack. We Americans sure love pouring that crap down our pie holes. I hope you haven't picked up the American habit of being fat. My fellow Americans hate being called fat, but we're some corpulent bastards if I've ever seen any. I used to work with a 400 lb (weight, not quid...althought I do know some 400 quid women...different story though) woman who would eat a whole tray of chicken cutlets for lunch. Once, during Xmas, she brought in a huge tray of cookies, must have been 500 of them bastards. I thought she brought them in to share with her fellow co-workers, but no...she left them on her desk and proceeded to snack on them all day. It took her 3 days to finish them. She was even meaner than she was fat.
Dont forget our Digital TV fiasco!
Tahts a joke too
Very true. Japanese people look down on everyone. But hey, they have some nice geisha girls. They know how to fuck. They're polite even when they're taking it in the ass.
That is a delicious idea.
yes let us celibrate druggies! Man do you realize how many lives drugs even pot ruin? I'd rather live with the oshycis than the druggies.
It's right next to the chat server for people who secretly fantasize about turnips.
(ask a silly question...)
Are we Americans any better? Maybe Australia could set an example for our indifferent voters :) If ya don't vote, more braindead analfuck fundamentalists will get into office.
Pay much for that post mate? Your countryman is right. Why go back to a country that is clearly trying to put the shackles on the infrastructure that is changing the world.
I have never once in entire my life (all spent in the States) heard anyone in the U.S. call a penny a copper.
Majority of voters are still clueless workers or droids of 35 to 65 years of age that probably never heard of theinternet.
- Monthly fee goes UP (from $65 to $95 in my case)
tinyduckEVERYTHING is included in the quota now. No such thing as FREE (except uploads to Telstra's news server for some obscure reason).
Oh woo-f'n-hoo. From 35c to 28c. Still plenty to get one lumped with a HUGE bill.
--
--
"Insert witty quote here."
You can view it all you like. It's just encoded, and they happen to sell or lease a nifty little box that can decode it for you.
That's an interesting situation you describe there. Seems like the gist of it is, "I only use a the phone a little and I only use a few of all the channels I get. Therefore I'd save money with metering and metering is better". Meanwhile, anyone who did make many calls or liked many channels would get a huge increase.
Funny, now who's getting a "free ride" and who is getting screwed?
Btw, their MEG is 1000000 bytes, not 1024*1024.
This is completely ignoring ISO rules.
Its as if a beer company was selling PINT glasses and there really was 550mls in there.
no. I want my ISP to do two things.
1) charge me for the resources I use, and stop telling me *how* to use my bandwidth. The internet is different for everyone. It's not just 'web and email' to me.
2) Tell me, broken down by the day, and preferably the hour, how much traffic I both received and generated. You need not tell me where it went to, or where it came from, only if I sent or received it.
Telstra is now acting separately to the Government, it has nothing to do with this. The Government now only makes sure Telstra sticks to its Universal Service Obligations.
And I thought 35 cents for a public telephone local call was a rip off...
Australia has flat rate local calls. Optus charges 20c (US 12c) per call, Telstra seems not to be telling... I think it depends upon your pricing plan.
There are two major problems we face with local calls to service providers - the first is the large land mass/small population, meaning that people not living in a city often don't have local call access to an ISP and have to pay long distance rates. The other is that if phone calls drop out while the modem is connecting, thus running up a large bill (our call waiting tends to kill a connection too), then Telstra, who own the lines, and the ISP can bounce the blame back and forth between each other.
I am on mediaone and we can not send any thing but ip. am i love playing rott on lans
Somehow, I don't think that the high-ranking executive who made the decision would have to pay his own company for his cable modem (if he even has one).
Flame:
I'll pay by the megabit for broadband, I'd play through the freakin nose for broadband. Someone dig me some broadband before I go psycho and kill all these damn whining lucky bastards who get to bitch on about per megabit broadband. I pay 30 bucks a month for a LIMITED number of online hours per month @ 28.8kps. The last thing I need to hear is some dick complaining about broadband prices and why they should be FREE. I can't buy cable let alone a cablemodem. DSL will be 2 decades in coming and it will be ADSL at that. Please don't bring up dish network, you all know broadband is not broadband if it has a 4 second ping-rate.
As far as I could ell from the article, this looks like they want to charge for receiving e-mail rather than for sending it. That's not the same thing at all.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
No democracy is perfect and even in the US or where-ever you are, you get bad decisions made by governments. Especially with newish technologies like computers and blinking lights and stuffs. With regard to compulsary voting, would people be happier if it was called "compulsary-to-turn-up-to-voting-booth". You have to get your name crossed off, but you don't actually need to vote, filling in the forms with 0 for example. Also we have essentially a two-party system like in the US, UK and I suspect Canada and many other commonwealth countries. New Zealand has a new system, I'll wait to see how the experiment goes. They had some troubles early, but its too early. To quote the Simpsons - Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us. Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system. Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate. Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away. [Ross Perot smashes his "Perot 96" hat] - Treehouse of Horror VII
I disgusted with Telstra's ploy to money grab. Even if it isn't, how can they expect people to stay with them? I easily go through a gig a week.. with all the online radio, video files, multimediea, game demos, it doesn't take long for the 4 users of this computer to gobble up the traffic. The one thing that really gets me is that the e-mail and newsgroups are being charged too. I though theat when you sign up with a ISP cable or not, e-mail and newsgroups were part of your monthly fee. I can't believe they have the gull to charge for all your e-mail. Makes me sick.
I'd be back to a dial-up.. because for half the price, and at 100 hours per month included in my monthly fee, I could download more on dial-up than the cable with a traffic limit..
Just my two bits on the situation
Australians are hard to connect, in fact competition does not help in this case. The Austrailian market is too small and widely dispersed. Duplication of services is driving the price up in marginal markets like broadband. As I understand it Optus has given up rolling out cable becuase It belives the market is not there in Australia.
There are not enough consumers for two cable networks, let alone more.
In fact it's becuase of the competition that we don't have aDSL and the like. Remember Telsra was owned by the public, much of its enormous profits were poured back into the network. Telstras network plans were pretty schweet, they were abandoned when Optus came along.
I'm not for monopolies, but competition does not always make sense, the market needs to be big enough to support it.
---Did someone say Turnip?
baldrik.
The second sentence can be interpreted a couple of ways, which makes Caine's statement ambiguous. Here are the two ways I can see to interpret his statement.
1: 'Not just this censorship tactic, but the previous censorship tactics as well are cutting the Australians off from the net.'
2: 'This (pricing) tactic is helping to cut the Australians off from the net, along with the earlier censorship tactics,'
Caine is guilty of bad grammar, so it isn't clear which meaning he meant. If number one, I agree with you. However I suspect he meant number two.
Most cable providers these days FORBID you from running your own servers. They sell you an internet connection, but proced to define what 'proper internet use' is.
'No internet servers of any kind'
'Not for unattended use'
'Only one computer'
etc.....
well well.... THAT is far more fearsome and detremental to the intenret than simply charging people for the bandwidth they use.
To the TV generation, who just wants video & audio streaming off the net.. oh well. BOO HOO.
What about those who want to use it for NEW and INTERESTING things?
Cable providers are not receptive to this already.
Ummm... have you *been* to the California beaches here? Fine by me if someone wants to own 'em.
Cottesloe and City Beach is a different story... at least in the US they're not *pretending* to be an advanced civilization.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
if you can be charged for spam, you can put a precise, true, documented amount on the damage caused by spam. Then you have a leg to stand on,
unlike in the states, where it's not possible to say "this spam cost me $x"
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
So, as your homeland succumbs to the ravages of commercialism, you prefer to live in the country that invented and has the major franchise on it?
... If a Yank or Japanese company tried to to annex Dee Why beach in Sydney, the local surfers would KILL them once they entered the water. In Australia, I can walk along the beaches in Port Douglas, Broome, or Whitehaven ... I can't do that at the Hollister ranch in California.
... I think by moving to the States you went from the frying pan into the fire, boyo.
BTW, it's America that has private beaches
So we have inept and corrupt politicians, and Telstra is a monopoly run by morons
Stay there. You complain too much.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
hmm, so does that mean that the .cx domain i just got can't have any porn on it because of austrailias internet censorship laws? or does the fact the .cx domain simply redirects to the united states make austrailia's laws irrelivant? You'd think it would, but then again they don't need a real reason to yank my access to the domain.
i'm NOT going to be any porn up on the domain (drowned.cx)-- in fact it doesn't have anything there right now, as i'm still trying to find someone to get to host my DNS and set up a VirtualNameHost-- but i'm just curious.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I could swear that ISDN lines in my area used to be $40/month and $0.4/MB... Probably the same idea... The phone company made a killing until the cable company buddied up with @Home to do cable internet for $40/month...
Yeah, and quit your IT job and go on the dole kiddies, Australia doesn't value your skills.
Actually, for a PUBLIC telephone local call, it costs 40c in Australia.
Can someone from Australia tell us why there's always some sort of privacy abuse or internet racket going on there? Is it usually coming from one company (Telstra?) or is it corporate culture at all net companies?
No, but MPs might not get free service lest it be viewed as a bribe.
And even if every MP and mid-level bureaucrat got free service, you could pick the victims out of the phone book. How many people would keep DSL service, no matter how convenient, if it exposed them to large phone bills because the rate structure is totally insane? IIRC, Robert Murdock is Australian so I'm sure there's at least one national media outlet which could take a semi-credible threat of this type of action and run with it.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Majority of Australians are more or less immigrants from Europe/Asia/America etc...
At least we're not full of drug pedling cartels here selling coke for $5/pop by 8 yearolds.
Seriously, telstra probably has enough $$ to fund a moon base by now. If they joined with the banks they would have a combined profit of... $15-20billion. that is... 15% of our GDP
They say that 80 percent of their customers will be better off under the per-megabyte charging? I seriously doubt that, unless they've got a high estimate of the amount of bandwidth most people use. I don't know how to seems to some of you people, but people tend to go for higher bandwidths for a reason: because they have a use for it. Most of the people using cable use it because a modem simply isn't fast enough for their purposes. And, as is said, charging per megabyte screws over the customer because of certain downloads beyond their control (ie spam). On the flip side, the customers do seem to have another choice for a cable provider. It seems that Telstra will just have to learn their lesson as their business drains away towards their competitor(s).
Interest has been very high in the upcoming rollout of Optus@Home, a join venture between a English-Australia telco and @home in the US.
People have been running around evangelising "$60/month flat rate" "$40/flat rate" in a country where decent (i.e. >3k/s on a 56k modem) speeds cost you $35-$45/month for 150 hours.
This suggests that they know what the competition has planned, and it's not a threat to them. A multi-billion dollar company doesn't change something like this because they feel like it.
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Flaubert
You're absolutely right. People have to learn to draw a line in the sand about these things.
Has there been one SINGLE good piece of news to come out of this country?
Good grief...at this point I think Christmas Island would be a better place to live. You can all get hosts on my new domain:
AustrailiaS.cx
Thats the problem, WE HAVE NO CHOICE. There is ONLY ONE CABLE ISP
Damn, it is news articles such as this that make me so glad I'm an American and live in the gold ole US of A!!
And I thought 35 cents for a public telephone local call was a rip off...
And I thought AOL at $25 a month was a rip off...
And I thought paying $100 a month for all the channels on the DSS Satellite was a rip off...
And I thought Microsoft Windows 2000 was a rip off- oh wait that is still a rip off!!!!!
Too bad about those crazy Australian net taxes - you'd expect that sort of thing from Canada.
The Blacks and the Dogs are OK, but those Irish are nuttin' but trouble!
Our trouble in Australia is that we basically have a duoply. In the US you have cable companies fighting tooth and nail with the telcos to provide access to your home. In Australia our two telcos, Telstra and Cable and Wireless Optus are also the two main cable companies. Neither of them is in a hurry to slit their own throats by lowering prices. Telstra has plans to double it's number of internet users (Telstra's ISP, Bigpond is also the largest ISP) by 2002 with the introduction of 2Meg ADSL modems. Hopefully the pricing will be sweet so we can all sit behind pipes that are slighter larger than our 56K modems! James Eling
The problem isn't that this is metered, but that it is metered the wrong way. The fee should be incurred by the party that initiated the movement of the data. But this idea ends up making you pay for things you recieve unknowingly - like SPAM. You can't just swap it around and have the 'sender' pay either, because that ends up making web sites pay for DoS attacks on them. The problem is that there is no technical way to detect who 'asked for' the data to be sent. You can't just charge the client software all the time since the server could send more data than the client expected (for example, downloading SPAM via IMAP.) The problem with metering internet packets is that there is so much atuomation that the customer is not in control of the amount of data he traffics, and nobody has proposed a *fair* way to bill people only for the traffic that is "their fault".
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Yeah, I'd have to agree with you that if the marketing types are hyping up the internal point-to-point freebies, then Telstra suddenly cutting it off (early/mid contract) is seriously bad.
:)
Of course, did anyone who signed up after hearing the marketing types ensure that it was in the contract that point-to-point was free?
Does the contract allow for cancellation if Telstra changes service? Knowing Telstra, I'd say probably not
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
I'm Australian and I don't know why either. The re-elected government had a history of convenient election 'promises'; increasing inequity in higher education; lack of concern for social wellbeing; decreasing job security and furthering the gap between the well off and the not nearly so well off.
I wish I knew why nearly 50% of Australians voted for them, when their policies seem focused on increasing the wealth of the most wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and to instigate regressive and highly conservative social policy. I can only guess that people were blinded by the nice sparkly shiny promised tax cuts (which after the GST again, only benefit those on an average or better income - at the expense of our whole social support fabric.)
Remember these are the people who - in a time of public hospital fundinc crisis - subsidised *private health insurance* to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm simply disgusted.
Who cares about BPA? There is a lot of competition around the corner.
TPG have announced a satellite access plan that is supposed to start in Januray, $20 per month unlimited ($12 US) and you also get some TV channels thrown in as well.
I don't know why people are getting so upset.
That's an even better way.
However, you don't usually pay 'per megabyte' on switched circuit networks, it doens't reflect any resource used. You pay for time, because the resource you are using up is the number of active circuits.
Priority, yes, of course. Make all bandwidth free, but have a way to pay for priority. This makes good sense, as you are not paying for things when they are not in demand.
I think a per-byte charge -vs- a priority charge amounts to the same overall effect... in a per-byte system, the 'priority' is regulated by who is willing to pay what. in other words, if you don't want to pay, you aren't using the network.
The priority system is more elegant, certainly.
here's some of the impediments to doing e-commerce/web companies and even just plain surfing in au.
- technical
- human rights
- business
- education -
While I may be portraying a gloomy picture (there are may success stories), the emerging theme here is that the problems are being created and perpetuated from the top. The real innovation and positive work is coming from the bottom up, much like the Internet itself. Moveover Beverly HillBillys, the Internet HillBillys are moving in.....bandwidth - because of the lack of competition, Telstra has effectivly hindered any growth in high bandwidth access to the backbone. What access exists is too expensive, is inflexible. Telstra goes out of it's way to extract $ (and hugh profits) but any implementations of broadband is laughable.
IT skills - it skills levels are good to very good, but there is a severe shortage coupled with a brain drain of top technical staff.
privacy laws - lack of, hence allowing business, government and external bodies to push the limits of basic privacy and rights, that other countries take for granted.
government censorship - federal government trying to force internet censorship that is technically very difficult even of it forces local ISP's for a lot of extra expenses.
governent cracking - ASIO given rights to crack domestic computer systems with permission from the crown, no legal process can be involved.
business - weak privacy laws allowing business (PBL) to attempt to capture, store and profile the entire country.
business conservatism - banks, big business, the engines of change for the country are reluctant to go boots and all>.
e-business's - toe-dipping, lack of funds, lack of business exploitation skills (not techincal skills) is holding back the growth of e-commerce.
venture capital - venture capital is looking up. More vc's are looking at funding start-ups.
funding - funding to education is being cut (Monash University), privatisation and business driven courses is the word.
course access - hard core science (and other non essential academic cources) are being replaced with vocational courses.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Isn't that the problem? The party with the clear majority in the lower house received LESS THAN 50% of the two-party preferred vote! And yet they still harp on about how they have a "clear mandate" from the Australian people. Next thing you know, the federal government will be pulling the same sort of tricks Joh Bjelke-Peterson was famous for.
you posted to the wrong article
When I say 'ISP' that has per Mb pricing, I refer to those that provide high-bandwidth lines to other ISP's, not those that provide end-user connections.
The reason a T1 line to uunet and a DSL line to your local ISP are so different is because of this. Both are megabit connections, and the T1 costs 10x the price.
We're not really living in a high bandwidth world at the moment. Most of the content you see is designed for low bandwidth users. So while their claim that most customers will save from the switch-over may be true at the moment, in the long term, as high bandwidth content becomes more and more prevalent (video, live conferencing, etc.), everyone will end up paying more.
The same thing happened in my country, but this time with phone lines. The national telephone monopoly, in a prescient move, decided to charge time based rates for local phone calls that were formerly free. This happened right before the Internet became prevalent. Their claim was that most users would save from the switch-over: which was true, at that moment. But as the Internet became more and more popular and people were connecting with their modems, the money rolled in and people payed through their noses.
If this doesn't convince you, think about it: why would the company make such a change if their line that the vast majority of customers would save were true, and they didn't believe that it would make them more money in the long run.
Two points:
Sometimes subsidising a service by charging a flat rate is overall beneficial, even if a strict usage-rate might be fairer per-user (bit-charging I think isn't even this.) Quality public education may well be much more expensive to provide in areas of low population density. So, should we charge people there? The cost would be: a significant portion of the populace being financially forced to move to high-population density areas (at a cost to our agricultural industry) or that same portion being left uneducated, crippling our future. I believe a similar argument can be made for telecommunications, and even Internet access.
if you don't agree, i'd like to hear why. why is a flat fee better than metered billing?
- joshy
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die.
After all the abuse we receive regarding pro/anti-Microsoft postings? I don't think so. (I also meta-moderate `unfair' any downwards moderation of an opinion posting, regardless of the opinion).
Ok, why can you get much cheaper cable internet access in New Zealand than you can here (Australia).
See Saturn an NZ co offering phone, Cable TV and cable internet.
POC
Bob Metcalfe is the same fucking retard who thinks Linux sucks because it's based on 30 year old technology. Guess we should scrap phones, light bulbs, cars, radios....hey...guess we should even scrap dumb old Bob Metcalfe's dumb ass too.
Grow up,
,SHIT year dude.
1. we still have shit loads of porn on the NET/TV/ magazines etc...
we are even having a big SEXPO here, www.sexpo.com.au, Check out some tits/ass there dude. No censorship
2. At laest we can say FUCK, SHIT, ASS, CUNT, on prime TV on all channels at 9pm!!!!!!!!! and no one complains!,
3. over time, 6-18months there WILL be more competition with our relaxation in CGT tax laws etc, we will have more investment here.
but only with the older payphones and my handy redbox. haha
Someone finally worked out what Telstra are doing (apart from those of us that work there).
The Telstra cable modem service is currently run with NO restrictions.
You can run a pRoN FTP site, host web servers, use it as point to point high speed data link, whatever you want.
There are no service limits either, if you're the only ftp server running then you get the whole upstream bandwidth to yourself.
The product has been poorly marketed (I often wonder if any marketing types know what mis-representation means), but the technically astute could see the service for what it really was, a 24/7 big pipe to the Australian backbone, and with no charging for internal (to the cable network) traffic you could go sick with point to point data.
This has been abused to the point where the average net surfer Joe now notices that his email with the jpg attachment takes a lot longer to send that it did a few months back. He logs a call with the helldesk and they send a tech to check the network. All the tech finds is that the guy down the street is running an ftp server and hogging the upstream bandwidth. He's not doing anything wrong, but Joe still has a 'slow' connection and isn't happy.
IMO service limits (1.5Mb down/64kb up) would cure most of these problems, and differential rates for internal and external traffic would probably be palatable.
OtzInOz
Yep.. here in Alberta I'm on cable. Unfortunatley, where I live, I can't use shaw (@home) A different cable company has jurisdiction where I live, so I'm forced to go with them and pay $40/month + $40/gig traffic whereas if I lived 2 blocks east of here... I could be on shaw and run free for my $40 a month.
It's absolutley insane! And I can't believe they're getting away with it. It's either this or dialup. They say it's so people arent running webservers off their cable modems. Couldn't they just port scan instead to see whos running web servers and whos not? Not to mention they advertise "Unlimited internet for $40/month" hmm thats funny... I see that and think unlimited bytes, not time.
I can't do anything I want to do. And it sucks. I'm constantly checking how many megs I've transferred in and out of here for the month.
I fear for your future internet access Oz
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
Well put.
They want to say 'We let you use this internet connection so you can do things we approve of. Surf the web. Send email... that sort of thing. We don't want you, say, simply transfering files between 2 places 24 hours a day.'
'So, when we said we would sell you a net connection that was 100 x faster than your modem, we meant it, but we are going to tell you what is acceptable'.
I want an *internet* connection, not a *web and email* connection, and I'll thank any potential provider not to tell me how I should use the internet, or what the internet is for.
After all, it's the explorers attitude, the ability to do new things with the network/protocols involved that made it so cool in the first place. Why stop now?
> break the download limits. When ever they fix that people will be going back to anarchy mode. Right?
Nope. ISPs hate traffic that goes out over the backbone because it costs them money - IIRC all big ISPs pay by the byte as part of the peering arrangements. But all traffic internal to their network is free. The obvious thing to do:
$BIGCORP pays Telstra $BIGNUM dollars to mirror its $MEDIACRAP inside Telstra's network.
Since internal traffic is basically free of peering charges, it doesn't cost Telstra anything for two cable modem users to share data between each other's stuff. Of course, they can still monitor and charge for it if they like, leading to the second obvious thing to do:
Packets to any host other than the ones hosting mirrors of $MEDIACRAP get billed.
This gets us away from the Internet and back to the business model that cable companies understand. You can only get "free content" (TV) from "content providers" (TV stations) that your "infrastructure provider" (cable company) has "approved of" (has received $BIGNUM bucks from in order to put on their cable lineup).
As a sop to the little guy (public-access TV), you can still produce your own content, but in keeping with the TV model, you're just like the little guy in the TV world. Yes, you can host a web site (get on the air), but with a per-month bandwidth cap that ensures you look just as small and insignificant as you are. ("on the channel nobody watches", "your show gets aired at 3:00 in the morning every second Tuesday", and "look at the way the guy's old handycam washes out all the color and the big snowy skips where he must have pressed Record and Play on his second VCR to edit the video".)
Hi, I work as a writer/security type for SecurityPortal.com, I do a weekly column, a weekly newsletter, wrote a 200 page guide to Linux security, so I feel somewhat qualified to critique this article.
That article is (I'm trying to think of a gentle word) bad.
---start--- According to hackers, 99% of cracking incidents can be blamed on so-called 'script-kiddies'. These are usually young people who manage to acquire some 'cracking tools' somewhere on the Internet and are keen try them. They choose a 'cool' target (such as NASA, the Pentagon or the White House) and launch the tools. Older, more established ---stop---Pulling statistics out of thin air is a bad idea. I personally would put the percentage lower based on the types of attacks I have seen a lot of (ie bulk scans performed by worm like programs, not something a "script-kiddie" can write).
---start--- Global estimates vary, but a JIR extrapolation based on mid-1990 estimates by Bruce Sterling, author of The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, puts the total number of hackers at about 100,000, of which 10,000 are dedicated and obsessed computer enthusiasts. ---stop---Are we talking about hackers (Linux kernel hackers) or crackers here? A mid-1990's estimate is horribly out of date by now, I don't think there is any remotely reliable way to peg it. Also you need to define it first. If a 14 year old decides to go to rootshell, gets an exploit, defaces a major website, gets away with it, but realizes how much trouble he might have gotten into, and never does it again, is he a cracker? Is someone who tries out a few exploits from rootshell on his ISP "for fun" once a cracker?
---start--- However, to launch a sophisticated attack against a hardened target requires three to four years of practice in C, C++, Perl and Java (computer languages), general UNIX and NT systems administration (types of computer platform), LAN/WAN theory,remote access and common security protocols (network skills) and a lot of free time. On top of these technical nuts and bolts, there are certain skills that must be acquired within the cracker community. ---stop---No. Many "hardened" sites are not maintained properly, or even if they are (not hardened enough of course) there will be at least one time when a new exploit comes out and is not fixed for say 6 hours, a large windows of oppurtunity. Classic examples are bugs in Bind (DNS server software used by almost everyone), most DNS servers that are secured are secured quite well, however there have been several bugs that surfaced this year that pretty much nixed anything you could do to secure it (on most systems anyways).
Protecting yourself from your software
Securing Bind
There are a lot more items in the article I take exception to. As far as social engineering goes you should make the author read Winn Schwartau's "Information Warfare" (actually he should read it in anycase, it's a pretty comprehensive book). You might also check out:
Sunworld article on social engineering
Also in general the article is pretty messy, there is a bit on social engineering a few paragraphs before the social engineering section, I would seriously recomend removing it and having someone rewrite it from scratch.
-Kurt Seifried - my sig deleted
You may not want to use BigPond - but it's looking like all Australian Dreamcast users will be. When they finally get around to enabling the Dreamcast internet service here, sometime in February.
Oh puh-lease. I only wish more American companies would come here. And er yeah.. Telstra's last CEO was American.. This surprises you? Telstra has always been largely US-owned. Sadly they don't seem to make much use of US expertise though. Telstra's problem isn't that it is US owned, it is that it is basically a very lazy, inefficient and backward company, and that Australians are so stupid as to perceive them as being "Australian" and therefore better. We have a telecommunications system that most 3rd world countries can rival. Those of you who think Optus, AAPT, Primus are dodgy and not very good; check your facts, you may be surprised.
Don't you think 'the right to bear arms' is really stupid? Unless you live in a country where anybody might shoot you if you get into an argument.
YOUR PUBLIC SCHOOLING SYSTEM ISNT EVEN SAFE!!! Look at all the masacres you have in your Schools in America.
Please point out "all the massacres" in the American schools. Guess what, there were rather few -- the ones that happen just get a ton of publicity. Now, take that number and compare it to the sheer number of schools in the US. Hmmm, sounds like you're exagerrating a problem here.
There seems to be a very large effort to kill the Internet in Australia. I am going to save and move overseas.. (I hear you can get a nice house in Borneo for about $11).
-- when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
To get 1.5gb of data, phone and cable TV I would have to pay $300+ per month more the the offering by Saturn.
Now how is that even remotely the same!
POC
After all, everybody knows that Canada is the 51st State.
Of course we all know the real reason of this change. It's to stop the fserves/ftpz/warez transfers that occur **within** BigPond network.
The big problem (IIRC) is that when someone in Australia downloads from America, the Aussie backbone provider pays the US backbone provider, but not the other way arround!
I don't know if that's still true, but it used to be at one stage. The US arguement was basically that there was so much more US->AU traffic than the other way around that it wasn't worth the US paying for their share. It was a one way deal. The AU (and other countries) telcos weren't too pleased, but short of not letting their customeers connect to the US, their wasn't much they could do about it.
I pay per meg (uni dialup modem line). A$4 a month, + 0c/Meg local (inside a few local unis), 3c/Meg Aus, and 17c/Meg International.
The uni doesn't like us running servers either, but mainly becuase they (and the government, and the telco) subsidise it. We can't use it for commercial purposes, that that isn't as much of a problem.
They don't like semi-permenant connections when the lines are busy (which is fair enough), so they have a kickoff arrangment that starts by kicking off people who have been connected the longest when the lines get busy. Almost never happens though.
I prefer it this way. Its cheap and useable.
It's also the ISO code for the currency.
I believe you are thinking of "GBP".
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I was under the imrpression that I would now get
... for $65 per ... for
... now I have to pay for
250MB for $65/month, but that all traffic (email,
news, internal) was going to be charged. At least
that's what I read the other day.
I went and read the details at "http://www/"
(which is the cable home page) and it says:
SERVICE ONLY PLANS:
"Basic" and "Standard" plans will be combined
into a new "Standard" plan
month you get 250MB and the rate after the
allowance reduced to 28 cents per MB.
"Professional" and "Business" plans will be
combined into a new "Professional" plan
$130 per month you get 550MB and the rate after
the allowance reduced to 24 cents per MB.
I think that my original understanding is
correct. Although I am pretty pissed off with the
whole deal. Paying for content that Telstra
essentially "manufactures" by virtue of the
network (ie mail, news and internal traffic) is a
complete joke. So what
spam? C'Mon.
I am going to seriously consider switching over
to Optus@Home when it comes online. At least with
the American influence, they might have _some_
idea of how to run a broadband service.
M@
..in relation to all of the "bad" news coming out of Australia in the last few months:
1. We currently have an overly conservative governement in place.
The current government came to power due to the economic hardships of the previous decade (thanks to a global recession), and the fact that the previous government had been in power for 13 years (ie. it was time for a change).
The current Government has been in power since 1996 and almost lost the last election, and are guaranteed to lose the next election. (They know it too).
2. Australia has the rough equivalent of the population of New York, spread across a land mass the size of the United States. This usually results in Australian's depending on its media services to highlight issues of concern. IT issues generally get drowned out by the latest political gaffe, or our sensationalistic story of the day.
IT in general doesn't sell newspapers and as such, Internet censorship and other technology-related issues are not news-worthy. It should be noted though, that the PBL-Acxiom database story made the front page of all major newspapers and TV news networks. There was significant outrage... for once I was happy.
3. Don't forget to do the maths with the exchange rates. I don't know exactly what it is at the moment, but the Aussie dollar usually sits at around $0.70 USD. That means that ISP rates and Cable-modem rates are not necessarily as expensive as you think they are, if its an Australian news article.
M@T
'sapientia potestas est'
the alternative of course is cutting those few people off completely... our @Home AUP says that they have the right to cut you off if you impact other users. I suspect a group of guys in the apartment complex down the road will be cut off very soon because they use the cable modem plant as if it was their own private ethernet... it isn't uncommon at night to see the segment saturated with IPX and NetBIOS traffic between their computers; that single cable plant is shared by a quarter of the city.
Your example of the multimedia folks would have certainly been booted off @Home.
I don't have cable yet as the pricing was so bad but with this there is no chance of me getting it now - I'll wait for Optus thanks!
Parasite News (check it out!)
I called them, , 1. they are doibng trials, 2 it shold be ready by July/Sept 2000
Reagan and Clinton are the two best presidents of the last 50 years. Can you say dismantling of communist empire and unheralded economic expansion?
Believe me.. I'm getting out of here as soon as possible.. I work in a support position which I'm told is a $30us/hour job, and I'm getting paid just over $5us/hour to do it here..
Make room for me.. I'm coming over
The problem here is in the terms and conditions. Australian corporate culture has made it almost mandatory for terms and conditions to have a little clause in it that lets the corporation get away with quite a lot. It doesn't matter if it's Telstra's cable Internet dodge here, or the terms and conditions of most ISP's, or the terms and conditions of your bank account, or your insurance. They all have a "we-can-change-the-contract-but-you-cannot" clause.
This clause would say something like "We can change these terms and conditions at any time without telling you about it." Or, to paraphrase, "This piece of paper is worthless. The terms and conditions are whatever we want them to be, and we will change them whenever we please if we think we're going to make more money out of you by so doing."
The terms and conditions commonly foisted by corporate Australia onto individuals and small business also tend use terminology like "We have the right to amend these terms and conditions at any time..." Note the use of the word "right" here, implying that the corporation has a right to do as it pleases, and you can't do anything about it. A more correct word to use here would be "privilege". The word "right" is also an unusual choice, with such terms and conditions usually being full of long words with Latin and Greek roots, instead of their more easily comprehensible Germanic counterparts. This suggests that the word "right" is a deliberate emotive choice intended to bully anyone questioning the terms and conditions into thinking that this clause is above question.
In practice, such a clause is far from being a "right". Instead, you have the right to negotiate on the terms and conditions of any contract. For example, while negotiating the contract, you could strike out the whole paragraph with this clause, insert a new clause that says "These terms and conditions cannot be modified without the written consent of both parties" and get both parties to initial the change. Of course the large corporation, being the bullies that they are, would have none of that because it's a more evenly-balanced clause instead of the clause that is extremely heavily weighted in favour of the corporation.
These corporate abuses are unlikely to be stopped as long as the corporation-friendly conservative Federal government we have in place now continues in power. This week, the Employment Minister attempted to "reform" labour laws (read: bash unions again and further erode working conditions of workers). This was understandably rejected by the Senate. Strange how there was nothing in these proposed labour laws to curb the widespread exploitation of salaried employees who work an average of 5 to 10 unpaid hours a week.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Procmail to the rescue!
Kills spam dead!
Requires access to a unix-ish shell account. May not be suitable for children under 5. Contains no MSG. Batteries not included. Not to be taken internally. Keep away from open flame. Do not taunt happy fun ball.
--
A host is a host from coast to coast...
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Gee, now when the ASIO decides to 'alter' data on your computer, you'll get charged for it. Gotta love it.
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
Here's a bit of calculation on how much bandwidth can be used in a realistic situation. I remember first calculating this when the first (metered) cable modem services started coming out in the U.S.
Assuming playing a game of Quake will pretty much completely saturate a 28.8 modem (you try web browing or downloading something on a modem connection while someone is playing) - 28.8 kbit 60 sec 60 min 12,960 kBytes
--------- x ------ x ------ = -------------
1 sec 1 min 1 hr 1 hr
So just an hour of Quake (at a modem's rate - LPBS normally play with a rate 4 times higher (or more)) takes up about 13 megs. In a month, that's over 400 megs just playing an hour a day. All this before web browsing, email, etc. IMHO, an hour of games a day isn't exactly "abusing" the connection like they claim.
Basically, a hundred or two megs in a month really isn't that much.
If it snowed at Xmas in the southern hemisphere....I think we'd all be fucked. Don't you?
This is utterly off-topic, but...
There are a hundred pence in a pound. One penny, two pence. It's also called 'pee', after the abbreviation 'p'. So, 50p is fifty pence is fifty P. Coins come in different values; 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 pence; 1 and 2 pounds. There may or may not be a 5 pound coin.
A pound is also known as a quid, and is often written 'ukp' or 'UKP' because many systems can't cope with the pound (£) symbol. The console in Linux on my system still doesn't know how to do it. There are many problems with printers printing '£' as '#'.
Notes are available in similar sizes to the US dollar bills - 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 etc. I have no idea what a 100 pound note looks like, or whether there are larger notes. The notes all look pretty different - the five pound note has a picture of George Stephenson on it (he supposedly invented the train - what about Trevithick? (sp?)) as well as the standard picture of the Queen; the ten has a picture of Charles Dickens, and the twenty used to have Michael Faraday. The notes get larger as their value increases - the higher value ones now have holograms and other gizmos on them to reduce forgery. There's a fair-sized, almost unpatterned oval on each where a watermark of the Queen's head goes. They're all on white(ish) paper and are pretty ornate, with coloured ink and swirly patterns. None of them are green. They all have a thin strip of metal running vertically through the paper.
There are many slang terms used to denote quantities of money; 'fiver' and 'tenner' are five and ten pounds, while 'grand' is a thousand. I can't think of any more at the moment.
Night...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
For those who failed Geography, Australia is a fair distance from the states, and trans-pacific fibre aint cheap, and since there is a slight lack of spare fibre, Telstra seems to have most of the monopoly and they can charge whatever the hell they want.
So get this. Very few ISPs in Australia even offer an unlimited time+date modem account (I happen to be one of the fortunate few who signed up with Microplex, an ISP which was recently aquired by C&W Optus, and managed to get on an unlimited account while it still existed). Not many ISPs can afford it when Telstra charge like wounded bulls (don't believe me? - http://www.telstra.net has more info than you need). If one ISP decides to offer unlimited time and data (OzEmail, Telstra with their BigPond home dialup service, corplink/ozramp have done so in the past), all the users flock to the service, clogging dialin lines and incoming bandwidth, forcing the ISP to close the service. The only three ISPs who offer unlimited time+data that I am aware of are iHug (http://www.ihug.com.au) who use satellite for externally routed traffic (laggy), Dingoblue (http://www.dingoblue.com.au - $45/month, basically resold microplex accounts under a dealership arrangement or something) and EISA (http://www.eisa.net.au) who offer unlimited time and data, and are quite reasonable (they run a nice games server network) but they kick you off every four hours to stop abuse. This is a pain when on IRC, playing a good game of Quake, or doing a "make world" on a FreeBSD box.
Okay, we can allow for that. Till the southern cross cable network (http://www.southercrosscables.com) comes in, international bandwidth will remain scarce, and yes, Telstra does deserve a little money to cover costs. But charging for a network which costs them pretty much nothing to operate in terms of whether it's 20% or 80% utilised is just beyond the joke. I was really considering Telstra BigPond Advance for a VPN, but I guess I've missed out. Thank god I didn't sign up with them these holidays.
So now everyone's hanging out for Optus@home (http://www.optushome.com.au), the cable service we've been promised for the last three and a half years by Optus. According to a phone call I made to their information centre, it *WILL* be unlimited data (yes folks!), and it will use standard DOCSIS cable modems (the telstra BPA network does not - so the market will be flooded with useless cable modems now), and it will be limited to a 128Kbit/sec uplink, so using the network for servers won't prove to be successful. IPs are also dynamically assigned (like Telstra), and running proxy servers/NAT gateways is against the Access User Policy (anyone know if they can actually detect a NAT gateway being used?). So if you want to run a server, you can either wait for optus@work (which will be bandwidth metred, but I've heard that it will have static IP addresses, IP address blocks, reverse lookup DNS records, that sorta stuff), or we can sign up with Telstra's ISDN service (around $270/month for OnRamp express, allowing you to have a perm virtual "circuit" which allows you to call the one number you need for net access) plus internet access charges (typically AU$990/month for unlimited transfer). They are prices for a 64K ISDN link. anything above usually has utilisation costs and excess bandwidth charges.
You know, I think that Australia is the only countery with a national bandwidth enquiry.
I've got a few friends of mine who are cable users. Both of them are jumping ship to optus@home as soon as they can, and one of them gets "smurfed" (flooded with data) every so often. A few months ago, he was smurfed a few GB (I think it was 3.something, meaning around AU$810 for data that wasnt used).
well in closing, I'd like to say that if Optus@home pulls off an unlimited data cable network and charges *reasonably* for it, it has the potential to change the Australian internet market.
This really kind of showcases my igorance both of Australian government and culture
You've described yourself pretty well.
I assume you're from the US from your URL (I tried accessing your page to check but it took too damn long - have you considered cable access?).
It's always a laugh to have Australian political processes criticised by citizens of a country that elected both Reagan and Clinton for two terms each.
Voting is compulsory in Australia. Unfortunately our party system results in two realistic options, both of which suck. From what I've seen, US citizens find themselves in a similar boat.
BTW, this charging thing was essentially done by a corporation which the government is trying to privatise. It is a business decision, not a legislative one. The censorship thing was a legislative one, this wasn't.
There are a few things to get angry about - like unasked-for lectures from clueless non-citizens. Call me again when you do something about your crypto export laws.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
200KB = 1.6Mbit
yes, you are an idiot!
Steve Case, anybody? It's all AOL's fault, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Just a different way of having a rate, size rather than time.
The original reason mooted by the telcos in their abandonment of the cable roll out was a matter of lawsuits brought by local councils over telstra in particular stuffing the cables up poles without any view on planning laws.
In truth they stopped when they intended to, having finished with the more affluent areas of the eastern seaboard. Living in Perth we have Telstra and Optus's official opinion that they will not be offering cable in the forseeable future.
ADSL is not really an option due to the current state of the network which has been under maintained over the last few years in an effort to maximize profits before the share offer. (Don't get me started on that. The whole idea of selling to the public what the public already owns.)
Being a West Australian internet user is like being stuck in a timewarp.
.sig
This network was not paid for by Telstra. Telstra inherited it when they came into existence from the remnants of Telecom. Yet they own it, they control it. Competition in the Australian telco industry is basically about companies fighting amongst themselves to see who can pay Telstra the most money. For every dollar made on Australia's publicly-built, privately-owned network, Telstra takes a cut.
Telstra should be demoted to the same level as other phone companies. The network should revert to public ownership, on par with the National Highways. Then, to govern use, the government can issue "bandwidth bonds", a promise to provide a certain amount of bandwidth within a 3-month time period (say).
These bonds are tradeable and transferrable. This means that telcos can trade capacity back and forth amongst themselves. It also means that if you want telecom. access, you don't need a middle-man: you can directly purchase bandwidth for yourself every few months.
Problems arising from the current setup (government-supervised monopoly) are neatly solved. Nobody can abuse pricing. The market sets its own value on comms. Telstra is forced to compete on services. The network's maintainence is no longer short-changed for profit reasons (a classical failing of monopolies is their productive inefficiencies). The network becomes a freely-accessible public asset.
Now isn't that just a potload better?
be well;
JC.
-- The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the fictional entity who may or may not have expressed them
Okay I suppose hotmail is nice and big and easy to bill, but how do you force them to pay and how do you force people who are based abroad to pay? Basically this just isn't a realistic thing to do.
My cable provider (Switzerland) just started doing the same (you get 2 gb/month free, then you pay for it.) At least they took their heads out of their butts and gave me a real IP instead of a 10.0.0.0 one behind a NAT box. Sigh.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Even if you did want to come to australia you'd have no chance of getting past customs with the diseases you're carrying
The above post is not offtopic. He's talking about a dilemna that will become very real to many people.
We've investigated your problem, and it appears to be due to a rectocapitation issue. Just pull that pointy little head of yours out of your ass [ssssssucckkPOP!] and it'll all be fine, I promise you.
Hope this helps.
Rupert Murdoch would use any excuse to get another chance at slagging off our government. First the olympics, then digital TV, why not internet next? I like his rationalization, 'I've lived in 5 different countries, I should know what works'. I bet he hasn't seen any Aussie headlines for months, we'll just have to wait for one of his advisors to tip him off on another chance for free publicity.
And how exactly would you bill a person sending from an almost annonymous hotmail account?
It's because of that Slashdot-reader called "Jimhotep", who sucks our network-speed now and then with his stupid comments in the last couple of months, like the one where he praises Hitler.
His quote: "Just why I yanked my kid out of school! I'm not going to let them screw him up! Look at it this way. He can have a High School diploma in 5 years or an Associates Degree in 5 years. Which will be worth more?"
What a fucking loser! He even abuses his own child by denying education! Everyone should search for his e-mail and send him spam, mailbombs and flamebaits, while we don't have to play per MB yet.
I live in Canberra, and even in a pissy little city like this I can get cable (in the newer developed areas). Those who can't, get satellite (see http://www.bigpond.com/cable)
Reminds me of a recent joke.
Q. What's the difference between an Aussie and a 747 ?
A. A 747 stops whining when it reaches Heathrow.
Australia Post and Telstra have next to nothing to do with each other.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
A few points to make:
1. I contacted Optus and they claimed that it WILL be unlimited data transfer both from within the cable network and externally, and the pricing will be "affordable".
2. Optus@home uses a separate date network to the Optus Spinnaker Internet backbone here in Australia - traceroute www.optushome.com.au from any optus connected host, and you'll notice it fly past few a few @home routers in the states). Keep this in mind - @home can afford to bring a cable over here and route cable traffic through it. It's not like they are going to go broke anytime soon.
3. You honestly think telstra is concerned about their cable service? It'll cost them too much money to move to the DOCSIS standard, and they want to phase out the network to replace it with ADSL later next year. Of course, they can't do this with a million cable users relying on the network. You'll get this answer if you ask a cluebie at Telstra (those things are rare) as to why cable hasn't been rolled out in Perth yet.
-zardoz
Alright... first you're worried about someone keeping track of the websites you viait, and in the next line you advertise that you're a member of All Advantage... a service that pays you to TRACK YOUR WEB SURFING? I'm detecting a serious glut of bogosity here...
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
I think the whole point is that this is not by ANY means fair pricing.
Telstra does not differentiate between local traffic, Australian traffic or international traffic. They charge the same blanket price of a ridiculous 30+c per megabyte and give you a token of 250 MB/month.
ISPs here are also charged per megabyte by their providers. It is something like 8c per megabyte for Australian traffic and 18c per megabyte for international traffic.
Even assuming these are fair, how does Telstra get off charging 35c per megabyte for LOCAL traffic on their network between two cable users?
just like this in New Zealand...
Telecom has the monopoly...and charges per/MB for ADSL. this limits growth for this emerging technology, give me flaterate internet anyday.
oh yeah , people vote. It' just we are not told anything. The only internet related stories that ever grace the pages of the newspapers here , or the TV , is kiddie porn, consumer ripoffs through credit cards, hate web sites, and violence.
,AFAIK, to check the law before it gets accepted.
That's it. nothing else.
you have to read the computer sections of the news on tuesdays to get any idea at all that the internet is not loaded full of paedophiles ready to molest the kiddies.
Pollies here don't fear getting kicked out , because getting all those paedophiles is a good thing, right?. The minister in charge of IT, ("information economy" ??, and telecommunications) is senator Richard Alston, who by the looks of things doesn't have to answer questions in the lower house , where all of the laws are supposed to get drawn up. He sits in the upper house , where all the people are supposed
So he can just draw up a law , get a bunch of idiot senators to blndly pass the law, (the liberals function is to blindly vote for whatever they are told, and to insult the opposition parties). and then the lower house will then just rubber stamp it.
Any senator who dares appose what alston wants will be accused of pandering to paedophiles. It's the kind of statement that sounds bad , but can never be proved.
The only pollie who is not completely clueless, and who has bothered to speak up , is senator kate Lundy.
Now about australian culture , the only thing that stops things being done is the "She'll be right, mate" attitude of a lot of people. Most don't care enough to do anything, or they simply think that a particular idea is so stupid, that it will never work anyway.
So, you have media orginizations who are desperate to hold onto their monopolies, who are prepared to lie to the public , you have a bunch of idiots in power who do whatever they are told, manipulated by another bunch who want to stay in power, so they tell more lies to the public and then make laws to make themselves look good, you have the public who either doesn't know or doesn't care, (or is afraid of technology and won't say anything), and then there are the people who know it all, but who don't "have a life", so are treated like dirt, because they don't play any sport.
right, I'm sick of party politics , who's for a completely online party?. that way, there's no secrets.
This has led to an extended intranet of Cable users on the Telstra network. The users have banded together to supply ftp mirrors, peering cache servers, newsgroups, game servers, bulletin boards etc. etc. were they share the load of the traffic that goes outside of the network and then sharing the fruits with the whole community therebye sharing the cost of the outside traffic accross the community.
By charging for this internal traffic Telstra are then going to make money from the traffic that is effectively traversing there this intranet. From what I have heared from users of this service most of them use MUCH MORE than the extra 150MB on the internal traffic that they are now going to get charged for. One user has stated that they had 4GB of internal traffic last month at 29c/MB thats $1160 quite a nice little gain for Telstra but not affordable for most users.
Here we pay a yearly car registration fee and a yearly driver's licence fee. I am happy that I do not have to pay by the mile.
Local calls are also flat rate. In my old house I had one phone for voice and the other for data. I paid the same for both but used one a lot more that the other. The voice did not get much use.
As long as the flat rates are low enough, I prefer them even if I would pay less for the same service metered. I like fixed costs if they are low and reasonable! I don't mind paying for someone who talks on the phone for 18 hours a day when I only use mine for 20 minutes.
Sometimes I go to an 'a la carte' and sometimes to an 'all you can eat' - both have their places if there are enough choices.
Here in my country, there is little or no choice when it comes to phone service, cable tv service, and internet service. If there truly was a free and unfettered market, a lot of what I often read would make sense. If I didn't like what I was getting, I could switch to another provider with a different pricing structure. If people didn't like thier service they could move and if there wasn't enoguh variety, they could organize a boycott. In some places, it is illegal to try and organize a boycott.
nuff fa now!
A Nony Mouse
Watching the riots in Seattle, I realised that in Australia it isn't the WTO that is screwing us, it is the guy next door. Half my friends work for Telstra and they are all nice people. Tels
This decision by Telstra as a half-private corporation is best in its shareholder's interests, which is the name of the game. Hey, when you are the monopoly, why not play it to your advantage?
As for our crazy legislation, sen. Richard Allston has no technical knowledge of the Internet. He is playing into the hands of paranoid voters who have been fed the internet media hype.
Is this really that uncommon? We pay by the meg after a certain amount (5 or 20gb) on DSL. It's like that in a lot of regions of Canada.. it used to be a lot worse here in NB, where they were going to start charging $0.05/meg (cdn) for access over a gig. Mind you - we get very good speeds, 250+kilobytes/sec in some areas, but it can get very expensive.
What BOTHERS me is that I can write a client that might attack people I don't like with pingfloods when they're inactive on the machine, and run their bills up very high. This could easily be done given the average number of protocols you could exploit - ICQ, Quake ....
I wonder why people don't get more upset about this - the flat fee model for bandwidth is what has made the net a huge success in North America, allowing telcos to make obscene profits selling hardware and service. Mind you - pay per use / metered bandwith is what those marketing types have wet dreams over.
Ah well. U auzzies be SSLin stuff, eh. :)
Kudos..
..don't panic
You obviously have NO idea what you are talking about. You refer to Australians as if we're stupid.. we know exactly what is going on, the government is proposing legislation which can never be enforced to silence people like you who would read an article about a proposal and think that all Australians are now barred from viewing porn. NOTHING has changed, and anyway, how is that relevant? One company ups their charges and you're telling us to skip the border? Competition is what gives us lower prices, and we're seeing competition. This doesn't affect 99% of the population anyway. Anyone who believes this is justification to move elsewhere, you may as well leave now.. in fact, do leave RIGHT now, you're the kind of uneducated wankers that think that if they catch a plane on new years it will drop out of the sky.. you're the wankers we'll see huddled around ATMs at 12am waiting for them to spit out money. Geez, relax.. its only the internet. I would love a reason to get my ass out of my chair and get a life.. I say more power to telstra, they will improve the health of Australians.
I see a couple of you are talking of being charged after you go over a certain number of GB but Telstra cable have two pricing plans AUS$65 / month for 250MB and AUS $130 / month for 550 MB with a minimum of 13c / MB over that. Not exactly large amounts of data there people.
Amen. I saw telstra's prices and I was impressed.. people are comparing telstra's service to services such as @home. Folks, this is apples to oranges. Not only are @home services heavily capped, their backbones are so overloaded its not funny. Telstra offers a service which is fast and quality. Want cheap shitty cable? call C&W optus.
Both my local cable modem (Wave via Rogers) and ADSL (many ISPs via Telus) suppliers apparently have contracts allowing them to charge for traffic beyond a certain number of gigabytes. My inability to forecast which of them will start charging first is one of the main reasons I am still using a phone modem. Once either cable or ADSL start charging for traffic, I will sign up with THE OTHER. But I'm told that both have the language in the contracts.
They just aren't USING that part of the contract. So far as I can tell, nobody on either (of our local) networks is being charged for volume.
Hey, you think the Ozzies are getting shafted? Here in the UK it's even worse. We get charged by time, by a company hell bent on slowing the lines down if anything; I can only dream of monthly quotas of gigabytes. What we need to do here is take away the asset of bandwidth - that'll encourage British Ripoffcom to invest in faster lines and bring charges down. Then we'll probably get charged per megabyte, but at least it'll be fast.
Therefore reducing international bandwidth costs for Telstra... 10x more subscribers at a slightly lower monthly cost with less bandwidth usage = much higher profits. Higher profits = higher share prices, happier investors, exactly what telstra wants to achieve. Good business move.
I'm at university in the UK, and I can sympathise with the problems this can cause... For 100 ukp we get a permenent ethernet connection in our room, which is very tasty.
However there is a drawback. Because universities in the UK are now charged for their transatlantic bandwidth, the charges get passed down to us, on a per MB basis: each quarter, you get 5 ukp worth of credit; transfers are about 2 pence per MB.
During November, some loser decided he would smurf me though, didn't he....using American broadcast IP's. As I had a static IP, this was an inconvenience to say the least... The result: 25 ukp worth of ICMP charging! But kernel loggin on ICMP comes in handy when you have to show your sysadmin proof...even if it did mean being assigned an IP.
Making the "victim" pay for being DoS'd is a major flaw, which if protocols become metered, is going to become a major problem to the internet on which we work.
What exactly are you posting to these newsgroups and sending in these emails?
If it's the principle of the whole thing - well lifes a bitch, but you shouldn't be cutting a service because of a few extra meg (max) out of your quota. You probabely use up 10x as much reading slashdot.
...to tell us which country you live in? A similar thing has happened where in New Zealand, and being aware of experiences in other countries would be useful.
Hello!! You can't equate moore's law to networking! MORON!
You guys should petition to become the 51st state, sounds like you are pretty much under total American(tm) control now anyway. Ask Alaska how great it is, the government actually pays people to live there now. Your country looks to be as backward as Alaska, so they would probably offer you the same deal. Not only that, you would get things like uncensored net access, free speech, and the chance to participate in the worlds oldest democracy. Don't forget to use lots of power words on your application. We get so many that we have to scan them and let a computer pick the most promising ones. Good luck.
... I am consistently disgusted by news of the state of the Internet industry in my homeland.
Oh sure, we can whore our coastlines out to any American movie company we want to (those portions of it that we haven't already allowed to be annexed by the Japanese, that is), and we will gladly divert taxpayer money into developing such amazingly destructive industries as tourism so that irresponsible Yanks can get their Dundee fixes any time they want to.
Give the film industry nice big fat government sanctioned kickbacks so that we can make trashy TV shows and B-level movies and be proud of it, no problem.
But when it comes to propagation of the Internet, which is guaranteed to be one of the big industry motivators for the new millenium, oh no, we have to resort to old-school big-business tactics and draconian censorship laws.
I'm ashamed.
My plans for moving back to Australia have just been extended another 5 years... which sucks, because I miss the beaches - oh wait, those are for Japanese tourist families only, now... (sarcasm)
Erck.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
With @home if you upload lots, they charge you lots more.
If I go to dynamic IP, then what about my mail domain? I don't want to have to adopt the domain of my ISP for an email address! I also don't want to rely on my ISP for services like a POP account and so on. I've been running my own servers for a couple of years now, and I like it that way thank you very much. What about my poor, pathetic web pages? Pathetic though they be, I want to run them off my Apache instance on my box in my domain under my administrative control.
Yet by the simple process of going from a static to dynamic IP, they would simultaneously wrest me of all this administrative control. My web pages will be served from their domain and their box and their http server, and so on, and so on. And what need is there for dynamic IP on a cable network anyhow? Maybe they can claim some small convenience in terms of not having to manually allocate IP addresses, but surely it adds complexity to their billing systems: dynamic IPs are harder to keep a track of than static ones, of course.
What really annoys me is that the technical decision to go with dynamic IP is probably there to prevent people using the system in certain ways, such as serving up gigabytes of pr0n or similar. But what about the little git like me? My needs and usage patterns are modest -- I probably consume less bandwidth than any number of NetMeeting users or enthusiastic websurfers, yet I'm going to be obliged to purchase pricier so-called "business" service just for the privilege of getting a permanent IP address -- and of course the "business" service won't be available until much later.
Alright -- my spleen is adequately vented now. Carry on, please.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I don't see what the problem is - there is adequate compensation. My unmetered traffic at present is definately not more than the 150MB difference. It's definately a benefit for me.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
I like in the US and I have seen this happen
here too.
Before Cox@Home started offering Cable Modem service, Pacific Bell raised ISDN rates and started metering during business hours.
This is a ploy by the incumbent to force the
new competitor to offer less than what was
originally planned so that time can be bought
and profit margins are preserved for the
incumbent to react to the competitor in
an unfavorable manner.
By reducing the value of the services provided
before the competition is in place, the competition can offer less value to the customer.
The customer will get used to this since there
is no one else he can go to.
This prevents the value of the service offered
by from appoaching its intrinsic cost and preserves profit margins for both the incumbent
and the competitor.
Since the incumbent is better financed than the
new competitor, they have more clout to deal
with the new competitor over time, and possibly
eliminate it though a buyout or predatory pricing.
Steve.
think yourself lucky. in the uk, my file download speed i consider good it it reaches 2 k/s.
I respectfully disagree. First, (in the US) there are too many providers out there that offer flat rate pricing. So implementing usage pricing is next to impossible without all of them essentially agreeing simultaneously.
Second, Moore's Law suggests that performance will double every 18 months for the same cost. So as time goes on, that T3 will cost half as much to provide. 18 months after that, 1/4 as much. Sooner or later, someone will figure out that bandwidth availability is growing faster than the number of people getting connected. That person will make a killing as the only company to offer flat rate pricing. And then everyone else will be forced to offer it, too.
The only reason that AU and UK provide usage based pricing right now is that the cost to jump the pond is prohibative. Right now, most of the info on the net is in the US. You'll note that US users don't pay anything to get data from UK or AU. That's because for all practical purposes, the US gets very little data from them and provides huge amounts of data to them. As time goes on, that will even out, and they'll provide enough valuable data to merit a US company paying for a link to AU or UK, instead of the other way around. When that happens, prices will be alleviated in UK and AU, too.
The cost of technology always goes down over time. Usage based pricing of Internet services would not survive the market. I don't think it will ever happen in the US, and I think it will eventually become a dinosaur everywhere else, too.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Some people provide examples of why such pricing methods may be good. I can't help but be skeptical. Start low, get people sucked in then when you need to raise the prices. People get hooked on the speed and can't go back.
Here in Canada the slow degradation of health care has begun to take a similar journey. They call 'em service fees. Used to be called free health care. $5 now, but once the tide has begun you can be sure it'll continue.
Enter the WTO which could begin to TELL our governments what the new rules are. So much for elections and leaders who abide by constituents wishes. Its all going downhill. Democracy is taking a backseat to corporate needs and wants.
As per example: The ontario goverment has declared 12% of out land surface to provincial parks - a good thing right- what they also did was allow mining, foresty, big business still operate IN these parks. Yeah real nice protected land we'll have. What a crock of shit! Oh, but they promise to replace and land used by other lands elsewhere that forestry and mining has finished with.
Go Y2K!!!
looks like poop, smells like poop, must be a politician.
Get the CD for a few bucks from cheapbytes. They even burn it for you, what more could you ask for?
What about all of this pyramid-scheme crap that people push in their signature's on slashdot? Like the alladvantage crap. I think one of the moderation things options should be "SPAM".
Gee, I never thought of that. Tell you what, you try it first. Go get a big gun, storm your way into your local government representitve's office, point it at his head and make hime change the law you like the least. Or maybe get a few hundred like-minded people, and take the Whitehouse... just see how far you get. The government wouldn't let you bear arms if it thought you could make a difference with them, now would it?
What you want to charge for is PRIORITY. For, the beauty of the internet is the fact that it can be used at 100%, total efficiency. You've started a long download? It will go very fast during the night, and slowdown during peak hours. There is NO reason why they should charge offpeak hours at all!!!
So to get back to priority. You want to make sure you always have good priority? You pay premium, and you get some guaranteed amount of the total bandwidth. You want to stay on the cheap? Well you can still use the offpeak hours at the max since not many people use it anyway.
That's the internet model.
--
Geez, if there is a way to demoralize a country via technology, Aussie politicians are doing it.
I'm amazed. Every week there seems a new story about Australia and the internet. It's apalling what the politicians are doing...
\begin{professor_of_economics}
:)
Usage based pricing isn't necessarily socially desirable. Most goods get classified as private goods, where a public good such as a park or lighthouse is distinguished by two characteristics:
1) nonrival--one person's usage doesn't diminish the value of the good to another, and
2) non-exclusion--it's difficult or impossible to stop anyone else from using it.
Another class of good is "excess capacity," which is nonrival, but possible to exclude people from, such as a movie theatre.
Internet access might (depending upon conditions) fall into this category.
Digress for a moment to your favorite public park. Suppose you go 20 times a year, and pay $100 in taxes to support it, and that you're satisfied with this arrangement. Now suppose that instead of the tax, you pay $5 every time you go. Would you still go as often? Or turn this around: you go 10 times a year, paying $10 each time. If it was a $100 tax, you would go more often (20 times).
Either way, the park is $100. Assuming that it isn't overcrowded, you're much better off with the flat rate. But take it a step further: if you pay the 10x10, you would likely be happier paying $125 for a park with unlimited use--or better yet, the $100 is all that's needed for that park, and you help build yet another one.
There's plenty of ways to manipulate these numbersl, but the point is that there are combinations where you will happily pay *more* for unlimited use than you would have paid in total for metered use. You're happier, and the park system gets better revenue.
*if* the ISP is not running into bandwidth limits (i.e., nonrival), it may see better revenue by flatrate pricing than by usage pricing, while its costs remain the same. If usage is forcing it to lay new lines, it *may* be better with metered usage. However, if technology causes capacity to grow faster than demand, this will not necessarily be the case.
For more info, take a course in public goods or finance at your favorite university
\end{professor_hawk}
Where I live (Saskatchewan, Canada), we get charged per meg on our transfers as well, but that is only after FIVE GIGABYTES. And the rate is 2 cents for each additional meg after that... what they are trying to charge for cable modem access down there is horrendous. Hell, I threatened to switch to ASDL when my ISP was originally charging 10 cents a meg after one gigabyte, but in comparison that is nothing. I'd like to say boycot the service, but I for one know how hard it is to go from highspeed to dialup -- i wouldn't think of going back to a 56k. Seems the only option is to complain and raise awareness until they get their act together.
Here in the Cayman Islands we pay at the best rate $36 dollars CI ($45 US$) for 14 hours only and additional charges for every minute after as well a a per megabyte charge all for a regular 56k dial up connection!!!
Plus, as the other respondant added, you can get unlimited dial-up fpr NZ$39.99 or less with NO call charges.
I assume the 80% is the www user who clicks around and talks about "surfing" and propogates the email worms when they get them by blindly clicking.
I assume that the other 20% is advanced users and gamers.
And I really doubt that this is cost recovery. More likely profit taking.
Um - I don't know of a single mainstream UK ISP that has per Mb pricing?
Maybe a few obscure little ones, but definitely none of the mainstream telcos or ISP's.
...Or masybe I just haven't looked at my bank account recently!
And i thought the 600ms pings were bad enough!
Not to mention that even IF they were able to bill someone, the person using Hotmail would get billed twice (once for sending to HM, the second time when HM sends it to the final recipient.)
:o)
I wonder if the guy who suggested this works for the government?
I'm old enough to remember all kinds of arrogant greedy tactics from Telstra over the last 10 years. This latest incident should be no surprise to anyone. In the BBS days, Telstra lobbied the government to gouge BBS owners at commercial rates for the rental of their dialup lines. In those days, people that wanted to network their computers were seen as a parasite to Telstra. These days they spend millions on advertising their starrey eyed notions of the internet to Mum's and Dad's. Ironic. Telstra is as much a blood-sucking monopoly as Microsoft. Expect no better from them. Don't let this reflect on Australia. To have Telstra is to be Australian - that's because they're a large and successful company, we hate that! Tall poppies must die!
...not all aussies are this psycho...just the New Zealand immigrants. :p
> "(The remaining 20 per cent) are basically using the network as a data network and they're pulling vast amounts of traffic off the network."
Just magine, people using the Internet as a "data network". How the fsck else do you use the Internet?
More to the point: unless Telstra assumed that the only people interested in cablemodem service would be the casual web surfer (for whom a 56K dialup is probably quite sufficient - most dialup users sit on a 56K dialup and has it idle for 5-10 minutes while they read a large web page), if you use your broadband connection like a television or a telephone (which about the only way other than "as a data networK" that I can think of), aren't you using just as much bandwidth as if you're using it to download gigs of pr0n, warez, and MP3z? :-)
The more cynical side of me says this is the first step towards a policy of "if you use it to upload large piles of your own content or download piles of data from other cablemodem users, that's bad, but the quotas won't apply if you're downloading streaming video from our TV-based mondo-multimedia-marketing-partners, 'cuz TV is Good For You" -- i.e. the logical first step that mass media might want to take in reclaiming their role as the gatekeepers of content. After all, what would a cable company like more than to see a world where writing your own content and downloading other people's content was bad and expensive, but downloading mass-media-approved and advertiser-sponsored content was good and free.
Well, I'm in Australia and ADSL is not available here yet. ISDN costs $990 a month for 64k which doesn't include the per minute phone charges from what I understand.
Cable is $65 a month for 250 *MB*. To put things in perspective, in the past 5 hours on my 33.6k connection I have sent 2MB and received 17MB of data - and that was spent reading some newsgroups, reading Slashdot, checking my email, and some casual browsing.
I was idle for about 3h 50min while I had lunch, watched a movie, had a shower, etc.
If I had a permanent cable, I would spend a lot more time on the Internet as there is no need to dialup, I would access alot more websites, etc.
With my present Internet habits, I use about 900mb per month (received) so I would be up for $292.50 per month for cable. With that cost, I'm not including the increased time and higher amount of websites I would visit with a cable either.
At present, my dialup costs $39.00 per month, and includes 150 hours.
Thats just my 2 cents.
--Shaun.
...for the most part. Some of the first cable providers tried a 'cap' and charged a hell of a lot more for everything past the first gig each month. Trouble is, most regular internet users found out HOW QUICK a gig can add up in 30 days. Playing quake2 BY ITSELF, *ONE HOUR* (cmon, guess how long diehards REALLY play) a day ON A FREAKING 33.6 MODEM would make it in 20 days for me. (50mb an hour recieved 40mb sent, no icq or whatever running)
/groan.
:) In another words, they won't oversubscribe past that.
;)
Most of them dropped the VERY STUPID IDEA but a few kept it. Now the 'corporate line' in good ol (/snicker) US of A is "we don't guarentee bandwidth" and "we reserve the right to cap rates when needed"
Of course some dumbass cableco (was it mediaone or ?) thought capping the up at 128 (isdn rate) full time would work.
Thank god theres competition in my area!!!
Cableco, Teleco with dsl and 3 other cos offering dsl NOT THROUGH PHONECO (they have t3s and whatnot, and run dsl from you to them:)
The best all around service I could find was $60/mo for 1.5 down 256 up NO TRANSFER LIMIT and guarenteed minimum of 128 up n 384 down
SIGN ME UP! I feel sorry for the other 99.99999% out there: either analog only, or a sour-tasting terms contract with a fat pipe.
Oh yeah, the one telstra whatever customer who posted up above and said he 'likes the change' is full of shit...$10 says he works for them
Flat fees is also whats made the net slow as shit in the US (I'm sitting on two clear 14mbit T3's and I often cant even drum up 500kbit's off of a single site). Per MB charges are good, as long as they are reasonable. I think that being charged $0.001/mb after say 116gb/month (25% duty cycle on a T1) is nice.
The day we reach the end of bandwith is the day the world ended.
Malachi
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
This really kind of showcases my igorance both of Australian government and culture, but isn't Australia's government popularly elected? It seems to me that there is a fairly steady stream of idiocity in the form of bizarre rules coming from that country. I mean no offense to any Australians, but why don't the lawmakers who are cooking up these crazy regulations fear getting thrown out of office? Seems to me that there is a lot to be angry about over there right now, and yet all I seem to hear and see is one more crazy rule or regulation after another.
RFC2119
I'd like to get cable access with something like a 5gig limit on data transfer if I was allowed to do anything I wanted with my access be that normal surfing or hosting websites.
But why do I get the feeling that the Big Pond users are still not going to be allowed to do as they please with their access? Stupid!
Even without the changes, those cable rates are horrible! $95 (Aus) for a monthly quota of 250Mb? Here we can get an limit of ~2Gb for $40 (Can = about $45 Aus last time i checked), and that limit is only paid lip service - they don't enforce it yet. ~$0.30 per Mb after that? that's also mental - so if i were to download the starwars quicktime trailer, it would cost me ~$7.50! Their pricing scheme is too high - their greed is showing.
Good luck on Optus, my southern friends! I hope they provide better deals.
Here in Canada, the body that governs communications (CRTC) made a decision that anybody can sell cable modem services via the existing cable network. (as in, the cable companies can't use their local monopoly status to sell their data services exclusively) This is recent, so it i haven't seen any other ISPs selling over the cable network, but this is sure going to keep them honest!
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
I'm still holding out for a modem that works using quantum entanglement to send data instaneously across arbitrary distances without the use of wires.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I only have All Advantage on one computer, and I only use that computer to read slashdot.
No comment at this time
OK. So they want to charge by the meg now? Does anyone else think this is a giant step BACK? As far as charging for spam, what kind of legislation will be in effect for the Aussies now to help cease spam? IANAL, but isn't it the same kind of legal issue that would go along with telemarketers calling cell phones (I believe this is illegal in the US)... shouldn't this same kind of precedent be put in place?
Charlie
-- .sig files go when they die?
Child: Mommy, where do
Mother: HELL! Straight to hell!
I've never been the same since.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
Honestly, per-meg pricing, IMHO, is THE way to go.
At some point, there is always a shared medium. The only way to regulate these services fairly is to put a price on it. It really irritates me that @home sold me an internet connection that was '100 times faster' than my dialup, but then told me that 'Oh, you can't run internet servers. You can't use it unattended. It's for one computer only'. blah blah blah...
I want to be told 'We'll lease you the equipment for $25/mo, and we'll charge you $xx/GB, period.'
Because, in the end, the resource they claim to 'protect' with their bandwdith limits and rules about fair use is nothing more than the channel capacity. Put a fair price on the bits, and I'll pay for my fair share.
Also, yes, spam is a problem. Yes, spam will end up costing you a bit of money. 2 things to remember, though.
1) Spam messages are *small* compared to everything you do in a day. This doesn't neagate the fact that spam sucks, but the totaly bytes incurred by spam every day, and I get a lot, is dwarfed by the amount of traffic involved in simply loading up the slashdot page once, or heaven forbit, the default MSN or Netscape page.
2) If you can put a real value on traffic, then you have a leg to stand on when you charge a spammer.
3) You can force the ISP to SHOW YOU what traffic they are charging you for. They can't just throw numbers at you, saying 'you used xx bytes'. They must be able to back that up somehow. That means records of how much traffic you used, what type, and when. After all, it's only fair.
In the end, billing by usage is a good thing, but we have to make sure we do it right.
We must take a stand NOW! The australians are more and more getting cut off from the internet. Not just this, but previous censorships.
"What does that have to do with me?", I hear you ask?
"I don't live in Australia" might be a thought that comes to you. But it's not that easy. If other countries and companies sees that it's possible to completly deny a country free access to the web, it won't be soon until more and more countries takes up this practice. And yes, it might even happen to you.
So let's stand up for the Australians, while there is still some time. Make your voice heard to the australian goverment. Protest, put up websites spreading information, do whatever you want, just do something, because soon it could be you, who are the victim.
from a bunch of starving bread stealers?
Maybe the cable company can fund a manned trip to Mars with the profits.
... since you let your government take away your firearms. No chance of defending your rights with sticks and rocks.
Hey, at least you guys don't have to deal with a plague of Californians in their 4WD SUV's (Let's go to Starbucks! I'll use my credit card!) I'd take the Japanese any day. At least THEY'RE polite.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You found a place that will sell you fuel at a flat rate? I'm impressed.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I've actually used an ISP that had a $0.20/MB charge in addition to their per minute rate. It really was an effective way to limit the time I spent online.. That was back in 1994, so all ISPs were charging a lot more than they are today. Now it's $5 a month for 128kb/s ISDN..
at .28 cents a minute a 55 meg download of unreal or quake would cost 15.40 --- That would suck. Think of the profit margin on their ISP link. They are screwing you relentlessly
I've got the most wonderful ADSL plan here in Canada.
:)
For some reason or another, the company has decided not to charge me. I haven't been billed for the setup fees or usage fees at all. I also don't owe them anything (I checked).
I think Austrailians should look into this kind of pricing plan. It is most satisfactory.
being involved in providing quality of services
over INTERNET, I can tell you that eventually
you'll see freebee as a 'best-effort services'
with no metering and with download time 'forever'.
There will be some guaranteed services for which
you have to pay, and those will be metered, one
way or another.
Haves vs Have nots
Grunt. Oink, oink.
This is a big deal to people in the US who get Unlimited downloads for $40(US) a month. And our Cable modem get speeds in excess of 1.5 Mbit ps.
So you want your ISP to record all your activity?
Of course not, but they don't have to. Their router can index an accumulator by whichever of the packet's IPs is local and increments it by the packet size. No need to look in the packet or even to correlate the source and destination.
i wonder if they send your account usage via email... i guess it would be like going to a restruant and and paying the waiter for your meal.. then paying for the paper he wrote the bill on.
Here in the UK, we may pay phone charges for local calls, which sux, but at least we get free access in return. In the US you get free calls and pay for access ... Swings and roundabouts stuff. Cable modem charges here (flat monthly fee) are running about par with ISDN at the moment and are not too high, about double phone line charge.
But this really sux. I hope it sends the firm bankrupt.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
"providers of software bugs"
How uncommonly candid for a software company! Most of the ones I work with claim to provide features! Bugs are what I get, of course, but this is the first time I've ever heard of someone being honest about it.
And the brethren went away edified.
3) You can force the ISP to SHOW YOU what traffic they are charging you for. They can't just throw numbers at you, saying 'you used xx bytes'. They must be able to back that up somehow. That means records of how much traffic you used, what type, and when. After all, it's only fair.
So you want your ISP to record all of your internet activity? Remember that you'd have to pay for that too; it'll take extra processing time and hard drive space to record confirmable details (not much, though, I suppose). I'd support it if it was just "during this hour you used X bytes", but I don't want a record of IP addresses accessed or anything of that kind.
I can just see the billing disputes:
"Let's see, you spent 14 hours downloading pictures of half-dressed semi-humanoid female cartoon characters, you ran a chat server all month for people who secretly fantasize about turnips, and spent an average of 4 hours every day playing a network game of a Sailor Moon Quake mod where you shoot hearts that make the target giggle and remove a piece of clothing. If you want to make a public fuss about what we're charging you, we'd be happy to release our supporting data."
Here in Perth, those of us with the cable passing our front doors can't even *get* this "service". It's not for sale.
Telstra is bound and determined to make data customers pay for their new (optical fibre) infrastructure costs. Even if it means squelching the market.
Telstra is clearly no longer an engineering driven entity, but a typical marketeering organisation driven by MBAs (and PHBs who wish they had an MBA).
There was a paper out of Bell Labs/Lucent a few years ago entitled "Just deliver the bits, stupid." Sage advice for Telstra.
InfoWorld scribe Bob Metcalfe has been predicting for some time that Internet packet metering would happen sooner or later. In fact he has even suggested 'ePostage' for email to deal with the cost of Spam. In other words the Spammers pay to send rather than you paying to receive, putting many of them out of business. Of course you and I would have to pay to send our personal and business email as well...
But then Metcalfe is also known for repeatedly prophecying the collapse of the Internet from an overload of data, and then changing the date he predicts it will happen as each past date rolls by. Not to mention some other rather bizarre musings about the possible impact of the real world on the Internet.
Still, if we assume a metered Internet of any kind, it only seems fair that the person originating the packet (requesting it if viewing a web page or sending it if email) should pay the freight.
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
The problem is in order to download the mass media approved b.s. you still have to break the download limits. When ever they fix that people will be going back to anarchy mode.
Right?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The real cost of spam is the time you waste sifting it out from among your worthwhile mail. There will never be a precise, objective way to calculate the damage caused by spam.
Here in Edmonton, Alberta, my cable company, (Powersurfr), imposes a stiff quota on our cable modems. With the basic package ($40/month) you get 1 gig of upload and 10 gigs of download, if you go over they start charging you extra. ($40/gig of upload over and $10/gig for download). It's a big pain because you always have to watch the quota. 10gig download isn't so bad, but the upload one is especially hard to stay under, I know people that exceed it from just playing quake over the net on a regular basis. Before I got my cable modem the quota used to be 2 gigs of total data upload or download, I can't imagine that how frustrating that would be. You can of course, get the plus or pro package which allows you more quota (and ips, and domain hosting).
.powersurfr.com (ie.. cmdrtaco.powersurfr.com), which is much nicer than 24.65.13.23.ab.wave.home.com or cx170741-a.elcjn1.sdca.home.com.
Having said that, the quotas are necessary to keep the service affordable and fast. Without quotas we'd all be uploading much more, slowing the network down and costing powersurfr more in data transfer forcing a price hike. Plus we get cooler hostnames than @home; there is a little web interface allowing you to pick an "IN A" for
Quotas suck, but if used not too stringently they can allow for the provision of an overall higher level or service.
$95 for 250M/month? Ouch. And $0.28 per additional Meg?
Lesse, I consumed ~3.6G last month doing my usual things (slashdot, game demos, software trials, updating the boxen, etc). My bill would run up to about, oh . . . $1057.19 if I have my math right.
That's just downstream. Mind you. Possibly another gigabyte worth of upstreamed data. So that's another $280.00
I have a 384k/384k DSL pipe from HarvardNet and heck, knowing this occurs, I'm glad I'm paying the rate I'm paying. We're pretty lucky to have things the way they are. Heck, unlimited* bandwidth cable modem service can be had for around $50 nowadays. Feel privileged, people.
*Some companies may suspend or terminate service for using extremely excessive bandwidth.
--
I wonder if the Austrailian Postal Service is feeling the same pressure that the good old USPS is feeling here in the United States...why else would a provider start to charge per e-mail sent or received?
:) That's what I say.
The "heat" (in whatever form) must have been turned on on the cable provider by the Austrailian Government
Jeff -- skibum, among other things
Damn should I order a Linux distribution or still download that freebie ISO...hmmm how many meg do I have left this month?
If I had a rear end aching as much as the rear end of our buddies from Oz, I would have left the country months ago.
First they let the government nail'em in the rear when they decided "No, not even adults can watch them titties on the Net"
Then Earlier this week it appears that the corporate sector is also nailin' them in the rear by allowing the highest bidder to know EVERYthing about EVERYone.
And now this?
It makes me wonder... What kind of sick mass-masochism do the people of Australia suffer from?
Or does the word Government make them run for the hills?
ps. that limit of 250Mb (the page says Mb not MB) traffic allowance is rediculous. I'm using an antique of a modem (28.8Kbps), I don't spend anymore than 4-5 hours online (tops, even on weekends) and I STILL have a monthly download of around 500MB (MB not Mb)
----
More information available from ;
http://wp.bpc-users.orgl
http://24.192.20.40/survey.htm
http://bpa.boxen.dhs.org/
http://www.itnews.com.au/story.cfm?id=632
http://www.it.fai rfax.com.au/breaking/19991201/A10364-1999Dec1.htm
http://www.newswire.com.au/9912/bighike.h tm
http://www.smh.com.au/news/991 2/02/bizcom/bizcom2.html
...your "2nd Post" is first and your "1st Post" is second. YOU RULE FROSTY THE FUCKMAN!!!
while i like having an unlimited account, bit taxes will eventually be necessary. i pay by the unit for electricity, natural gas, water, gasoline and many other products. why not pay for our media and internet with the same scheme. sure, we are all complaining because a 250 GB/ month limit is not a lot when you download code all of the time. but eventually we will all be downloading lots of things much bigger than linux kernels and using many more GB/mo. and when that day comes the price per GB will be very low. lower than the unlimited accounts we have today. internet deployment isn't sustainable without such a metered scheme.
lets take a look at some examples of flat fees:
the phone company: do you realize that a phone bill in the city is subsidising the cost of providing phone service to rural areas. i don't even use a phone very often because most of my communication is in person or through email. and yet i still pay the same amount each month. if i paid by how much i used and how expensive it was for the phone company to provide the service to me (not much since i live in a 4 million person city), then my phone bill would probably be 5 bucks a month instead of the 25/mo i pay now.
the cable company: i pay 35-45 dollars to media one per month for cable. and yet i only watch 5-7 stations. if i could pay by the station i would have fox (for The Simpsons), wb (for buffy), comedy central (for southpark), cartoon network (for dexter's lab) and a few educational channels like the history channel and discovery. and yet i have to pay 40 bucks a month to media one because i have no choice. if i paid by the channel then media one would know exactly what i want to watch and it would be to their advantage to offer stations i really want rather than the most popular or the cheapest stations. (ever wonder why they have so many shopping channels? because they make money off of those instead of paying for them). with metering they might start to offer stations like m2 (mtv with actual music instead of reality shows) or oddessy (with lots of muppet stuff). a metered system would do wonders for my tv viewing, but as it is i can no longer justify paying media one for 50 stations i never watch. i may switch to a dish if they can offer fox, but i'll still have to pay for much more than i watch.
summary:
flat fee: gives some people a free ride and others get screwed. this is oppression.
metering you pay as you go. you buy as much as you can afford. you save as much as you want. this is freedom.
vote for choice. vote for freedom. vote for metering and competition.
(maybe i went a little over board there. :)
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die.
This confirms my initial suspicion. Anonymous cowards should not exist.
It could help reduce the number of first posts (they'll never vanish), and make people accountable for...well....strange comments like this.
[ I actually picked up the word "tasty" when I was in the States....though what difference this makes I have _no_ idea. ]
:)
I hate to say it, but my first reaction to this ludicrious idea is that we should organize "ping parties" so that each of us will send a few megabytes of data to every single person who was either responsible for the idea of billing a person for the actions of others, or who declined to strangle this shining example that of misconceived raw capitalism in the cradle.
Let's see, if we get even 1% of the people who currently devote cycles to SETI@Home to donate bandwidth we should be able to saturated this arseholes' bandwidth. That way the don't get horrible performance and a sizeable bill. (E.g., 250 kbps, for a month solid, is over 80 GB.)
Of course, in deference to Jane's that would be cyberwar if non-Australians did it. But if it was done by Australians, within Australia, the worst they could call it is cybercivil war, and most people could call it the world's first cybercivil disobedience. That, and a damn fine example of being hoist by your own petard.
The saddest thing is that I honestly can't decide whether I'm serious about this. I have a very low opinion of DoS attackers, but I have an even lower opinion of anyone who would casually break one of the central foundations of Western Society. If a country allows you to become liable for a substantial charge for something totally beyond your control, it's only a very small step to other charming ideas we left behind at the last millennium (or at least the last century).
Some other ideas not far removed from this, at least IMnsHO? Visiting the sins of the father on the son. (Your mother died owing MegaHospital for his cancer treatment? *You* are now responsible for her unpaid $500,000 bill. Your father died in prison after serving only 12 years of a 20 year sentence? *You* will spend the next 8 years in prison finishing his term, and if you die, your child will finish the term!). Debtor's prison. Slavery (or in polite society, "indentured servitude") in lieu of payment of debt.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
What is it with Australia and technology, particularly internet-related tech, these days? As an Australian I am forced to throw up my hands in despair over such ludicrous occurrences such as this latest Telstra debacle, and not forgetting gems such as the Net Censorship bill.
;)
These proclamations and poor business decisions merely result in the local Internet community being shafted. The Australian government periodically exorts their new initiatives to spark local invention and innovation, yet short-sighted and knee-jerk actions such as these effectively torpedo such initiatives.
I do realise that the Aussie govt really has nothing to do with Telstra's latest action, but hell, they pushed the privatisation of 'em
What's hidden in this article is that Telstra have either lowered their rates or increased download limits.
They closed some holes, but they always said they'd do that. And only because some small but heavy number of people have been using the Telstra network as their personal LAN.
The holes they closed are email, newsgroup and customer to customer traffic. I used to make use of the holes while I could, but always expected them to close. I'm actually glad at the lower rates because most of my traffic is internet, and therefore I'm saving money. I'll still be looking at Optus cable when it comes out, but this move is a positive one.
Once again, Telstra have shown that being a monopoly means that you don't need to give a damn about any of your clients.
Good on ya Telstra bend your customers over once again!
I can understand your point perfectly, however, to allow you to understand the situation here in OZ, you should understand the current pricing structure.
There are several plans for cable access via Telstra, but the standard one is a A$65 per month (12 month contract) which gives you 250Mb per month and a rate of A$0.28 per meg over and above that. So, if in the course of one month, you go a mere Gig over your 250Mb (not too hard when you play games n stuff) your looking at a staggering A$280 extra for that month.
This is why there are screams of outrage. There are a lot of internal services people use *because* of the old "no charge for internal" system.
I don't think that Optus have got their Internet cable system up and running yet, but I certainly hope they get it running soon, and set a decent price structure. It's either that, or Australia stays with the PSTN modems.
Yours,
CJ
PS If you wanna find out more about the Telstra cable service, the place to look is here.
It seems that Telstra's finally figured out what has been going on for a while now. Last year I remember discussing data comms issues with a number of the multimedia operations in Melbourne. They were connecting to Telstra's cable network and transferring gigabyte files between themselves for free. Basically, Telstra wasn't charging them for any packets that were kept wholly within the cable network. It was only packets that originated from outside the network that were charged for.
:)
:)
Thus, they could transfer to their hearts' content within the loop. I think that this was what the Telstra rep was referring to when they said "used as a data network" - eg: intensive data transfer between points on the cable net.
This is also similar to what happened when some ISP's changed from "all you can eat for $x per month" to time & MB charging. They had profiled their useage and discovered that 80% of their bandwidth useage was consumed by 10% of their clients. At one ISP, one guy was paying AUS$30 per month and sucking AUS$1k per month 'cos he was listening to radio, watching videos, grabbing warez, etc. After they changed to the new billing, the slurpers left (following LOTS of bitching) and their previously congested link suddenly became much more effective
Thus, it could be that Telstra have realised that their network is being overloaded and they haven't even reached the majority of the population. If they keep going this way, they'll need to upgrade their infrastructure (which has already cost them a shitload). Thus, they're clamping down on internal "freebies" to ensure that bandwidth is available for charged useage.
How they're doing it may suck, but hey, when you're looking down the barrel of a major infrastructure upgrade vs pissing off a few people - which one do you go for?
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
I am a citizen of AUSTRIA (yes, the small country in the heart of Europe. No kangaroos!) and Internet in our country SUCKS. The main phone company, operated still by the government acts as if we were going to the 20th century, not the 21st. We just got ADSL, with ridiculous limits, you pay per minute AND per megabyte.
Cable is pretty expensive ($70 a month) and there are so many timeouts because it's overloaded so it is unusable.
Modem (non-DSL) connections and ISDN are available. You end up with a monthly bill of, say $125, and find out that you just read your mails and did some limited Web access. (This is charged per minute).
But... the good thing is we don't have ANY kind of censorship. Maybe it will come in a few years (Austrians are always a bit slower, at least the politicians) but then we WILL FIGHT FOR OUR FREEDOM. But for now, we are ok with the situation.
This is nothing new for the telecommunications industry in this Country.
Those in the US who enjoy unlimited local calls?
We dont, we pay for each one.
Those who enjoy ADSL?
Telstra here are testing it to the point of stupidity, we will be lucky to see it before 2001. And even then, only in sydney.
Those who enjoy cable in the US?
Only one, perhaps two cities(Sydney, perhaps melbourne) in all of Australia even have cable. So most of us dont even have it.
Australia is an internet Dinosaur in regards to integration of emerging technology and services for internet access, and Telstra charge ridiculous fees to users and ISP's alike. To the point where it is rare to find a decent unlimited data dialup connection.
Until we get some large well funded competition in this country(at&t, bell, MCI, sprint etc), and can loosen telstra's strangle hold on the larger internet fibre pipes and services here, we will still be that dinosaur, and will be poorer for it aswell.
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
Ma Bell is doing the same type of things here (Toronto, Ontario) realizing their monopoly is about to end. Don't worry, it's usually a sign of better (and cheaper) service to come.
But it really sounds as though the Austrailian public is getting fucked more than the US, and that the Australian Gov is more hypocritical than ours.
.gov is knee deep in tracking what people do on the web and reading email, and hell bent on doing what it can to add "morality" to the internet.
You can't surf pr0n, but it is totally cool to show womens tits on daytime soap operas. Page 3 girls are OK, but god forbid that a web site shows a little thigh. The Aussie
I find it very hard to believe that it's at all suprising that the cable modem services over there are now taking advantage of the population to their black little hearts content. I connect through Media One in the US, and these fucks charge $50 a month for service that is only slightly faster than a 56k modem most of the time, and goes off line almost as much as AOL.
What really suprises me is how accepting the Australian people are for all this crap.
But hey, to each their own.
ok... I'm going to stand up and admit to some ignorance here... can someone please relate the british monetary system to the illustrious "pound sterling" reported on the financials . . . PLEASE! ... quid? I've been reading more and more discusions of british money and every one of them seems to introduce some new term that I'm going to have to guess is modern slang.
what is a pence? and a ukp? and even though it isn't involved here
as turnabout and to explain what I mean here is the American system in terms of the US Dollar.
a penny (slang: a copper) is a one cent piece and is worth 0.01 USD; making it the smallest monetary unit off-line. a nickel is a five cent piece; a dime is ten cents, and a quarter (more recent slang: a silver) is twenty five cents; making four quarters equal to 1.00 USD. These are all common coins. less common coins are the half dollar (old slang: a slug) at fifty cents and the silver dollar at one dollar; the silver dollar was more recently reissued as the Susan B. Anthony Dollar and was a dismal flop in terms of public acceptance. There are more gimics in progress, like commemerative state quarters (I've got all five so far!) and a "gold dollar"...
Curency comes in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10,000, and 100,000 USD bills; officially they're Treasury Reserve Notes - and they're all the same ugly green. The one dollar bill is also called a buck, a green back, and a skin (all slang, in order of decreasing commonality). The two dollar bill is rare. The five dollar bill is called a spot in some circles, a spot is a ten dollar bill in others. slang for the hundred USD bill is a 'C' note, while 1000 USD is a grand or 'G'. most bills have a president pictured on the front so they often go by the name of the president... a Franklin is a hundred, a Grant is fifty, a Jackson or an Andy Jackson is twenty, Hamilton is a ten, Lincoln a five, Jefferson is two, a Washington is one dollar. bills larger than 500 USD are no longer printed and being removed from circulation, with some of the real big ones never having been publicly circulated.
ok, y'all got the point.... for those that really want to know more the US Treasury and US Mint are both using president Gore's invention.
This is what happens when one entity is given full control without other "competition".
Note: My subject is not to be confused with the term "monolithic OS" of which Linux is one. Contrary to Tanenbaum, this is good.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GCS/M/Sd?s-:a---->?c++UL+++P++++L++++ E+++W+++N+K-w---M-PSY+t+5?XtvbDI++
The reason this pricing is bad is that it makes you pay for things you have no control over. Imagine if you had to pay every time someone rang up your telephone, even if you didn't pick up. That's what this is like. It's like having junk mail sent to your house COD, and being required by law to pick it up and pay.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
afaik, all providers (including my isp) are planning on major rate hikes for everything next year.
in all honesty, my employer has decent access, and we're allowed to use it on our breaks, so I think I'll be saving $20+ a month as of next year.
maybe I'll spend it on a gym, lose my programmer gut, get laid more often...yeah!
FUCK PAYING FOR THE NET AND GET A LIFE! GET OUT OF YOUR HOUSES AND DO SOMETHING!
Now - who pays for all that infrastructure, fibre cables, satellite channels, servers and so on? There are a few options:
Sooner or later, you and I pay. The predominant model (#3) means good old "user pays" applies. And, hey - if you suck down the odd gigabyte or two each month, then expect to pay more than Joe Emailer who is online for 10 hours a month and would be lucky to generate (or receive) more than a few meg.
Sure, it sucks that Telstra are changing the rules mid game - but, hey, what big corporation wouldn't if it knew it could get away with it. If you don't like it - vote with your wallet. Cancel you Bigpond service. Change your mobile phone to a competitor, change you home phone provider to a competitor, and tell them exactly why. Even if they don't change their ways, you well feel much better about it. Personally, I have experienced Telstra's Bigpond service (home dial up, not cable), and it is crap, and they charge like there is no tomorrow. I don't use them - and will never use them. Sooner or later, the message will sink home - they will loose money big time, and either change their ways, or get out of the business.
But, the bottom line is, for many of us, Internet access is either an essential part of business (and hence, an input cost to us, and is factored into our business plan), or for home use - a fun thing to do - and I pay for what I enjoy, to the level that I believe it is worth.
My 2 aussie cents worth.
- Your monthly fee stays the same
- Your free traffic goes up
- The price per MB over that goes down
To me this looks like something got better and nothing got worse. So what is compensating for what here ? If it's like you say for everybody then sure as hell nobody would complain, would they.twi
ISDN onramp services are also like this,
0.19$/meg, that is 1000000 bytes, not meg, but a mill.
That includes all packets even ones which fail.
HDSL also is 100% like this as the monthly charge with zero traffic is $2500, so on top of that you have to pay $.19/meg
Telstra, making it easier, for shareholders to make profit
This is REALLY bad. Had the same charging been in place in November BPA would have cost me $850 for that month. In our internal cable newsgroups there has been thousands of posts about the new charging, not a single person i can recall saying, on the newsgroup, they thought the charges would benefit them. This seems like a ploy from Telstra to get rid of the 500 of so technical and vocal group of Big Pond Advanced (BPA) customers and replace them with 5000 or so people who get cable with a computer package and only their 14 year old son uses it for surfing the web and email.
Telstra is a famously spam-friendly company. They have made it very clear that you can spam all you want from any other network to advertise sites hosted there; it's official policy.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Thats because american companies come here to wreck havoc where there are no laws to stuff em up like in usa, so they reign freely to do what they like.
Remember, Telstra last CEO was American.
btw, nearly 90% of our companies are now owned by American companies now.
Since we don't have guaranteed freedom of speech in Australia, I can get sued for defamation if I say what I really think. So I'll be nice.
We are a tiny marketplace. Most businesses are controlled by powerful monopolies or price-fixing arrangements between would be monopolies. So we don't get to vote with our dollar.
We have an aging population who are largely conservative, racist and anglophile. We let English citizens resident here vote even though they have no loyalty to our country. So we didn't get a republic.
We elected a conservative goverment as a balance to a couple of decades of less conservative government on a platform to revitalize the economy and reform taxation and got a lot of patronising bastards as a by product. The result is that the economy is sweet and government tax on computers will fall from 22% to 10%.
Unfortunately, we lost any chance at a republic, freedom of speach, privacy, a voice for young people, any rights workers have managed to get over the past two hundred years and a few other things like automatic weapons.
So basically Australia is a great place except that young educated people don't feel as if they are adequately represented by our democracy - which is probaly true of most modern democratic states.
Watching the riots in Seattle, I realised that in Australia it isn't the WTO that is screwing us, it is the guy next door. Half my friends work for Telstra and they are all nice people. Telstra is mainly owned by the government and aussie mom and pop shareholders. But they still screw the consumer somehow.
After years of observation I think Telstra's recipe is something like this. Find a cool technology. Base the pricing of it on what it would have cost to implement with 1960s technology and then market it to the only segment of the market that doesn't actually want the product. Then outsource the implementation to a company with no experience in that area (possibly swedish). If a product should be successful, move in on resellers and VARs markets so they desert the product completely and never want to work with Telstra again. To cover losses, don't pass on savings made by advances in technology in core services like long distance calls. Then run lots of expensive adds on TV with pictures of happy Aussie farmers (who in reality get screwed by expensive long distance phone calls) and use the "we are a great Australian company not a monopoly" mantra to the ACCC.
At least it doesn't snow at Christmas. That would suck big time.
See you on #au-help ;-)
SeaBreeze
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
The problem they are talking about is the cross cable traffic, not internet traffic. There is currently no metered data so long as you do not exit the cable WAN to the rest of the 'net.
What does it mean?
It means, for AU$65/month you get a 1Mb/s WAN link, regardles of distance, time or utilisation. That makes it about 100 times cheaper than ISDN, and about 500 times cheaper than a 2Mb frame link. It's safer, and more reliable, and so long as you don't turn off you box, you can run a Linux based router, with software firewall, on a 486 with cable connection for about three months on the same IP. IP changes? no biggy, just manually update your routing table and viola.
This is what the 20% (more like 5%) of people they're referring to are doing. I know, I suggested it to our Co. for a cheap alternative to Frame (Melborne/Sydney/Brisbane) plus, you get net access direct in each city.
I understand where they are coming from but they are going about it the wrong way. They should be metering traffic on a port to port basis, thereby selecting the difference between standard internet and mali et al traffic.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Here in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada I pay $25 US a month for 1 gigabyte up, 10 gigabytes down, with additional charges for going over that. I run 3 servers, 7 domains, one of the servers is a prototype/devel www server for a local startup, yadayadayada, and haven't yet broke the limit (oh, and I also mirror portions of ftp.redhat.com, ftp.zedz.com, and a few other related sites). Strange that my ISP feels comfortable offering this (they used to charge $30 US a month, and dropped to $25 last month, they also have several 10k's worth of subscribers, the last number I heard was around 30k a year or so ago). They have excellent backbone connectivity (and a 10meg pipe to the UofA, which hosts openbsd.org, 2.6 installs off their server in under 15 minutes =), and the only major network outage in the last 12 months was a windstorm that knocked one of their towers out of alignment (they sell T-1, T3, fiber, microwave, etc. links to). If some rinkdy-dink little canadian company (no offence intended to my ISP =) can do this, why can't a national monopoly do it (as I understand the situation in .au)? You think the .au government would realize that high speed internet access is becoming a basic part of our national infrastructure like roads and power. I would not be able to do my job (which pays well, and hence benefits the government with tax dollars) without high speed internet access (I do several megabytes of mail a day let alone downloads).
Telstra announced another record profit last financial year.
Off the top of my head, retail ISDN is currently $Oz50/month for the 64kb line, plus $Oz3/hour connect, not including Internet connection. An all-you-can-eat Internet connection is $Oz990/month for 64kb plus $Oz1000 setup fee; 128kb is about $Oz2100 a month plus $Oz0.29/megabyte over a certain useage %age (calculated daily to maximize Telstra profits on the busier weekends).
Here in Perth, Western Australia, companies like RadioWAN are offering decent connection speeds (256kb to 3Mb wireless in the metro area) with free in-system traffic but costs are still relatively high ($Oz1100 connect, plus $Oz200/month for 256kb, plus $Oz0.19/MB above a smallish byte limit).
Many Perth ISPs are hooked up through a data exchange called WAIX, which makes a considerable amount of traffic (e.g. local tucows mirror and redhat mirror) free.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Australian Ultima Online Server Message Board
This prices are outrageous!! Seems to be that the only places where you are allowed to use the Internet are U.S and Canada. Damn telcos!!!
- no phone line required
- e-mail and news were not included in the quota
Now there is only one thing that will remain quota-free, and that is uploading to newsgroups on Telstra's news server only. Why the f**k for? I can only imagine that someone high-up at Telstra or with influence high-up uploads an awful lot to the Telstra news server.
I can imagine the Telstra executives planning the BigPond Cable service...
"Let's give these customer schmucks the fastest domestic Internet access yet and a ridiculously small quota. That way they can reach the limit faster than ever before and we'll reap in the profits from excess charges."
"Hurrah!"
"Good show old chap!"
*general cheering and patting on back*
I'm stuck in an 18-month contract with this service, so I guess I gotta lump it.
*sigh*
tinyduck
Its possible that a percentage of costumers WILL have cheaper access, as this kind of charging system will discourage most people from using the internet to a large amount.
When my mother first obtained an Internet account, she got a 15 hour account and would get on, download mail, upload mail visit a couple of sites that friends had verbally told her about, and then log off. This she would do only every couple of days, thus never even using all 15 hours she had availible.
I explained how much she was missing, and conviced her that unlimited account is well worth its weight in gold, and that I would pay twice what Im paying now for an unlimited account.
And of course now she averages about 200 hours a month.
My point is this, if you break down the cost in to increments, you run the risk of people expending less increments.
Whether it be time units or packet units.
How ever if you have a (pretty much) flat cost people will use it as much as they want.
For some (like me and everyone I work with) this would mean that several computers would never go down, for others they will continue to use there 25-30 minutes a day, being as this is all they desire, to use.
Hit Link
Maybe /. should start a new section devoted to detailing how fucked up Australia is. Every week this jackass country passes some 1800's fundamentalist law. They make our politicians look like geniuses with integrity.
The Australian (ONE FUCKING NATION!) people and the Australian culture are truly autochthonous (look it up, people). There are some silly claims that you hear about how the British sent them there and that the (ONE FUCKING NATION!) language they speak is derived from British English, but that's all a crock of hooey. The Australian people (CRETE CRETE CRETE!) evolved locally from the indigenous marsupial population, long before the recently-arrived "aborigines" (who are not even (ONE FUCKING NATION!) remotely aboriginal) showed up and tried to claim their land. This is (CRETE!) irrelevant, those (CRETE!) people don't even exist. At any rate, this is a genuine honest to God example of parallel evolution, both biological (the Australian people) and linguistic (the Australian "English" language).
Australia is the largest landmass on Earth and has the largest nuclear arsenal (and the most cock rings) of any nation in history.
Australia is most beloved of God of all nations, Australia rules the heavens and the earth, Australia (ONE FUCKING NATION!) holds the keys to the kingdom of God and you'd best watch yer ass, boy, we're a-gonna kick it.
BPD users can happily do whatever the hell we like. Of course we get gouged. Just not as much. :)
Yeah, my access costs SUCK. $435 ($300 US or so)a month for 128kbps ISDN plus 19c/mb received.
I like it tho :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.