Why I criticise Telstra.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter, but in the end the 140 character limit can make it difficult to put forward your ideas and thoughts clearly. Last night I posted a few rants on Twitter about my annoyance with Telstra and their download capping policy:

Thank you @telstra for letting me know how it is to be living in the technological dark ages. Seriously, it’s 2009 and you cap downloads.

When I write this I’m not writing this from a Europeans point of view. I’m writing this from a geek’s point of view, someone who knows the technology and how other countries did it right, and wrong and got laughed at for doing it wrong.

When I voice my annoyance about the state of the internet here in Australia I’m usually told two things.
I’m told that as the citizens are spread out much more in Australia then Europe the infrastructure is much more expensive and is far more technologically challenging (due to distances). The other excuse is that Australian ISP’s buy bandwidth based on their customers (kind of) pre-ordered usage plans.

I can understand that keeping the majority of Australia online can be more difficult and expensive, but other countries have had similar difficulties and is doing just fine now.

Norway is a perfect example here. I see Norway as a small version of Australia when it comes to a lot of things. Strange enough Australia and Norway have a lot in common.
In Norway the copper lines were so bad that when you could only access the internet via dial-up the lines were basically designed for speeds no higher than 28.8 kbps. I even tried that myself, and my connection was far more stable with a 28.8 kbps modem than a 56 kbps modem. In other words, the telecommunication in Norway was horrible.

When I lived in Norway I had the second highest speed my cable internet provider could offer me at that time, which was 2Mbit. While you could get up to 100Mbit certain places in Sweden.
Norway could easily have done the same Australia is doing now, providing high speeds to compete, but with limited download. Instead they wanted to let people have lower speed, but with no limited internet access.

The excuse that Australian ISP’s are trying to match the usage each month based on the customers plan is just bad planning from the beginning. Instead of buying bandwidth based on statistics, they are purchasing bandwidth based on hopeful and cheap assumptions. It would be interesting if everyone in Australia changed their plan to the lowest for three months, and suddenly changed their plans to the highest and used all that bandwidth. Would the Australian internet collapse? I hope not, but based on the poor planning it might. It wouldn’t be because of the infrastructure, but because of the poor planning in place.

From what I know about Telstra, their infrastructure would easily handle uncapped downloads, if they slowed down some of the download speeds. As it’s just a minority who would use this capability.
I would gladly be paying what I’m paying now for only 4Mbit, but no limited download.

It really annoys me when Telstra pushes 100Mbit in Melbourne. Who really needs 100Mbit if it’s capped? Seriously, you could probably use that limit within a few days.
And don’t get me started on the semi walled garden Telstra is running. That is absolutely disgusting and so old. Seriously. They let you have access to the Internet, but only for a limited amount. Accessing their site (bigpond.com) is unmetered. Seriously? That is so old.

From what I know, Telstra is doing what many telcos did when Internet was scarce and new to the public, and they really don’t know what they are doing; which is about 10 years ago. In other words, I feel like I’ve traveled back in time. Traveled back to the technological dark ages.
The irony is that I think broadband came to Australia the same time as in Norway, so you would think Australia would have managed to pull their finger out from their hole by now. Apparently not.

As I said, this is not the point of view from an European, but from a geek.
Stop believing the lies they are telling you. The infrastructure is good enough in Australia to go uncapped, if planned correctly. Apparently the Australian telcos don’t know what they are really doing, and you the customer is paying for it.