I just received a call from a nice Telstra rep ‘informing’ me that because my home line is provided by Optus Cable (along with broadband), we can only use that line for Optus ADSL2 products, and miss out on Telstras ADSL2 offerings.
Cry me a river.
The offer was to “upgrade” me to a Telstra landline, which would open up the door to Telstra ADSL products now that my area has been ADSL2 enabled. Incidentally this would open the door to far better value-for-money providers than Telstra for ADSL2 products, but I guess that wasn’t on his script to tell me.
I have a long memory of the broadband struggle this country has endured because of Telstra. I remember seeing a preview of Telstra cable before its retail launch, and yes being amazed at the speed. The offer then was $95/month for 100mb. I remember thinking if only I had that.. Fastforward to the launch of a rival in the broadband space with Optus in 2000 and things became great. Optus embraced a system called “netstat” which calculated the average users download usage (netstat 1.0), and allowed you to do 10 times that (netstat 10.0 - beyond this you were given the boot). The beauty of this system was that as our collective usage online grew, the average usage grew, and hence our ‘download limit’ grew. It was a system of beauty. At the time, this enabled ~20gb/month of transfer. Around the same time, broadband ‘pioneer’ Telstra slapped their users with a 3gb cap. Great value for money.
When Telstra introduced ADSL on their landlines, they finally enabled wide broadband competition. Except with a handicap, in that the line fees ISPs had to pay telstra were so exhorbant other ISPs had to sell plans at a loss in order to compete with offerings from ‘Telstra retail’. When Telstra introduced a $30 ADSL plan with a microscopic data allowance (and insane excess fees), other providers couldn’t even get a line for that price, let alone their own costs added to that.
Really, they have not changed. Telstra recently proposed a FTTN (fibre to the node) plan which would involve Telstra laying fibre between its exchanges, and offering a product roughly similar to ADSL2 (over copper lines, anyhow) to the end user. Catch was, they would only implement it if no one else could use their lines. This highlights Australias number one challenge with broadband - we cannot have Telstra holding both the infrastructure card AND selling a retail product while answering to shareholders. There is no win win in this situation. Either Telstra wholesale charge a fortune to other ISPs for line access, driving up the value of Telstra retails plans and hence delivering a better earnings report for investors, or Telstra wholesale does a good thing for the country and makes the broadband space more competitive, most likely driving down sales at Telstra retail, and hence disappointing investors. The two simply dont work together.
The government needs to split Telstra in half - one side that can answer to shareholders with retail products, and the other that can push our countrys’ broadband infrastructure forward. Sell off the retail side as an independant company and watch it sink when it has to pay full rates for line access. We are so far behind in the broadband race globally its a sham, perpetuated by none other than Telstra. If we get a new government, I really hope they do something about this. Something has to untie the infrastructure lock and start investing in it, so that we can start moving forward.