It seems the Post Master General is still in existence. At least if you believed the absolute morons who refuse to acknowledge there is any other telephone carrier in Australia other than Telstra.
Sure Telstra own 98% of all copper lines in Australia… however few are aware the ACCC effectively controls Telstra retail & wholesale pricing so that Telstra resellers are able to compete with Telstra retail. In simple terms, the competitive offers are not with Telstra and any competitive offer from Telstra will likely see it withdrawn very quickly after a flood of lawsuits. So it can’t be price as Telstra is typically double the price of any other carrier.
“But Telstra have the best service!”. I’m not sure how anybody could say this either. NextG is the only word that needs to be said.
When NextG first kicked off, Bigpond started offering Wireless Broadband to everyone claiming coverage is available in their area. During this time I made a decent salary with on-site calls to confirm there is no coverage, and that the modem has to be returned to Telstra. At the time Telstra claimed that a result of no coverage with Wireless meant the customer could only exchange the wireless modem for an Bigpond ADSL service that was double the original cost. No refund was possible. The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman found this quite interesting and helped several of my customers receive a complete refund and expenses to cover my invoices.
Recently I’m seeing another problem with NextG – shit hardware. Sierra Wireless 880U & Maxon BP-USB devices often fail to work on brand new computers. Why? Bigpond seem to encourage the customer frequently reconnect the modem device… and do not ship the modem with a $1 USB extension lead. Therefore, the USB connectors wear out very quickly.
The latest trend for Bigpond Technical Support (13 3933 – tell them I sent you!) is to forward you to Gizmo. Bigpond does this when they decide they’re incapable of helping you. Gizmo charges $99 per hour for telephone support – often due to simple problems that Bigpond staff should be aware of, or faulty hardware which Bigpond staff should be familiar with identifying. $99 an hour for telephone support is quite laughable since my firm charges half this. Maybe I should bump up the rates.
Yet my firm offers technical support for the significantly cheaper phone and Internet products resold by Telstra… locally and free of charge. There are no Telstra stores in my area. My firm doesn’t just support the hardware we sell – but endeavour to support any hardware the customer may be using. Being familiar with our area, we don’t attempt to sell products that a customer cannot obtain anyway – we research our claims before we make them. Similar stories are true of many other Telstra resellers. My firm only resells Telstra services because its conveinent for support reasons – yet very few can understand this reasoning and still believe Telstra will offer a better grade of support (even though they call us to do it, and get billed for it).
There is also Bigpond E-mail. Bigpond have quite a reputation of being the biggest contributor to spam in Australia. In fact the “dynamic addressing” of their network makes it harder to identify spammers on the Bigpond network. They have had several national outages that have lasted from minutes to days. Bigpond does not offer virus or spam filtering without an extra cost. And, by using Bigpond mail it makes it much harder to change Internet companies. You can in effect get a better service from Google or Hotmail for free that is not tied to your broadband invoice. But still, somehow Bigpond E-mail is better than Australia Post.
A copper telephone is still required in order to have an ADSL connection due to Telstra policies. However VoIP is actually booming right now as its only a fraction of the cost to make calls, and results in significant savings, even when a VoIP account is added to the monthly invoices. Some people when they hear the word “VoIP” immediately put you in the same basket as Indian telemarketers. Have these people never made international calls and realized there is a latency? It is not the technology that creates the latency, but its the distance. VoIP is likely to be the only form of a conventional telephone service available, in the not to distant future. Telstra will likely fight VoIP feircely as their copper network is designed entirely around carrying voice signals. VoIP and the National Broadband Network will pose a serious threat to Telstra revenues if the NBN is ever built.
Excess charges is a huge reason to not go with Telstra. Bigpond Internet have a standard charge of around 14c per megabyte for excess downloads, which equates to $140 per gigabyte. Yet Telstra resellers can do it for a couple dollars. Its completely unreasonable to charge these kinds of prices and is a marketting trap in my opinion.
So back to my original complaint about Telstra. Why is there no other option other than Telstra? From my point of view, Telstra is not an option. I ask you – how do I signup to the Post Master General? The service you describe is nothing like my description of Telstra. My description of Telstra is: unethical, overpriced & poor service. I wonder which carrier Telstra staff choose…
The largest blow to the Australian governments proposed Internet Censorship are proxy servers that can be used to autonomise Internet traffic and evade any filters in Australia by relaying off International servers. That point alone, Internet Censorship is doomed to failure.