Major Australian ISP Pulls OpenOffice 336
thefickler writes "Australia's largest Internet service provider Telstra BigPond has removed OpenOffice from its unmetered file download area following the launch of its own, free, hosted, office application, BigPond Office. The removal of OpenOffice was brought to TECH.BLORGE's attention by a reader, who complained to Telstra BigPond's support department about no longer being able to download OpenOffice updates. The support people were quite open about why OpenOffice was no longer available, i.e. because it was perceived to be competitive with BigPond Office."
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:5, Informative)
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:5, Informative)
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Storm, meet tea-cup (Score:3, Informative)
No, the point is that the ISP previously offered OpenOffice on their servers which would not count towards users' monthly download limits. Now, they've removed it from the "free area" and users will have to take a 120+mb hit to their monthly bandwidth limit to download the software.
Frankly the whole concept of "unmetered free download areas" reeks of AOL and CompuServe, to me, but I guess it's beneficial for users with a really low and strictly-enforced monthly download limit.
and don't forget cover CDs (Score:2, Informative)
It does seem small minded of the ISP to behave this way - but hardly the end of the world.
Try dealing with Bigpond billing (Score:3, Informative)
- The new billing system still does not recognise certain discounts. I've called repeatedly about this and been promised they will be applied retrospectively once the billing system is fixed, but that they can't give an ETA. I don't know if I'll ever see that money, and I'm considering switching to a different ISP. (The only reason I'm hesitant is that I'm on cable and other ISPs would be ADSL. If my phone lines aren't niece in addition to setup costs I have to worry about an ADSL filter etc.)
- The new billing system allows for automatic payment. The old system did not. What they fail to explain to you when they tell you this is that if you apply for automatic payment, you will no longer receive paper bills. What's worse it's not even possible on their new system to have both paper bills and automatic payment. Email's nice but it's still difficult for some employers to accept an emailed bill if they're paying a portion of your Internet bill as part of your entitlements. (Fortunately it's not been as big a problem with my employer as I thought it would be).
- When I made a formal complaint through superviser, I was put on hold on and off for about an hour then told that the system was running slow and that I'd be called back to confirm the complaint had been put in. I provided my mobile number, which they did call just the once but since I didn't answer it they didn't bother to call or email again.
Bigpond has always been a pig of a company to deal with and they're only getting worse.
Re:Other sites? (Score:5, Informative)
In Australia, ADSL is a joke. Telstra was once a government owned monopoly and now it is a legislated one, owning all the last mile copper and being the only one responsible for installing new phone lines. Telstra also markets it's own ISP - Bigpond.
Telstra has no incentive to make DSL more affordable and has even taken the prior government to court over attempts of the government to do so. It appears that the only thing Telstra and Optus (the co-horts of Telstra) understand is that by holding the reigns on services and service prices in their tight control will make them more money. The "pair-gain" crazyness is another example of just how stupid the situation is.
In defence of Telstra's management, that is exactly what the arrangements of privatization regulations encourage. It really is another one of these privatizations gone crazy scenarios.
It should be of no surprise that Telstra would do this with OpenOffice. I think that the public expect Telstra to have the interests of it's customers as a primary objective but it should be no surprise that the shareholders hold the attention of the management.
The only way to fix this is to remove the monopoly protections. Telstra needs to be changed by the government and it's monopoly broken if Australia is every going to get services that are other than a joke.
Having said that, the new Rudd government has made a pledge to make improvements in internet access, although I think it's going to be a hard one to pull off.
Re:Big Pond? (Score:1, Informative)
Metered-Unmetered (Score:3, Informative)
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:5, Informative)
I admit, it still doesn't seem like much, but Telstra/BigPond's cheapest and most heavily advertised ADSL2+ product has only 200mb of prepaid bandwidth, with excess @ 15c/Mb and it has a lockin contract.
The ~120mb OOo download will now take up the majority of an uneducated customer's monthly uncharged bandwidth.
Yes, there are much better ISPs in Australia, but many people still unfortunately use BigPond, mostly for bad reasons.
Re:How about forcing their customers too.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:so to be completely neutral they should charge? (Score:5, Informative)
Newcastle University http://www.newcastle.edu.au/ [newcastle.edu.au]
3 Downloads for these sites will not attract usage charges for BigPond Members - Please be sure to check that data accessed is from the featured University sites and is not from a linked 3rd party site.
-nB
Re:Big Pond? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Other sites? (Score:2, Informative)
Most people that have a clue stay as far away from Tel$tra as is possible, so I find it most surprising that "an IT veteran with more than 25 years experience in the IT industry" would go anywhere near BigPond. Telstra are blood sucking leeches and this kind of move is not in the least be surprising.
Although not unmetered, if you want a fast Australian mirror of this sort of thing, first port of call should be http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/ [aarnet.edu.au] which is only accessable to Australians.
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:5, Informative)
Telstra are truly horrific to deal with. They cap your bandwidth at a ridiculously low level, then force you to pay through the nose. The justification being that they have to pay for the bandwidth they use to connect to other ISPs. Telstra are supposed to provide a place for very popular files to be hosted so people won't go outside the Australian subnet and incur more operational costs.
What they are doing here is using their monopoly control as an ISP to make alternatives to their ASP offering more expensive. Telstra customers should expect their provider to take steps to cut costs by local mirroring and make service better. This doesn't just hurt the person downloading, it hurts the internet connection for all of Australia, because everyone is with Telstra, and now they're going to be shipping OpenOffice back and forth across the fiber lines that support the continent, repeatedly and needlessly.
Scummy.
Re:WTF is wrong with Australia? (Score:3, Informative)
There are a number of factors. Firstly, the population in OZ is about 1/10th that of the US. This means that the market is smaller and the competitive pressures you find in the US are just not as profound in OZ. The telecom supplier in OZ (telstra) is a government created monopoly. The regulations under which Telstra (which owns Bigpond) operate are truly detrimental. No competitor will ever be able to make a dent into Telstra's monopoly unless the government fixes the regulations.
If I was paranoid, I'd say that the Telstra privatization was an example of the government being led by the benefits of the corps rather that the benefits to the people and hence probably corrupt. This is why Australian's who know what's going on are a little touchy with things like removing OO from the "unmetered downloads".
However, the government being 0wn3d by the corps is a title I give to the USA. Medical insurance, medicare prescription plans, ecent FCC decisions, electronic voting machines, Microsoft being let off etc are all pretty nasty examples of the corps taking over the government.
Australia just changed their govenment as will the USA next November. There is some hope that the corps will loose a little control on both changes but the proverbial jury is still out.
Comparing Australia to the USA on this metric doesn't say much I suppose !
Re:Why is this news ? (Score:4, Informative)
Removing OpenOffice from one of these sites means that many people who are on the smaller Telstra plans will have to PAY to downloaded it.
And if you live in Australia, and you don't like it then it's just tough. Almost all other ISPs have similar pricing structures as Telstra, because Telstra is selling the connections to them and they setting the prices. An un-metered domestic internet plan in Australia means that your connection speed is dropped back to dail-up speeds when you reach a certain limit.
For an idea of how expensive internet connections are in Oz, look at the pricing here:
http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansandoffers/default.jsp [bigpond.com]
This is news for people who live in Australia.
Re:How about forcing their customers too.. (Score:4, Informative)
Telstra is not the first choice for anyone with half a brain, they sucker in the less tech or financially savy with deals like tieing in a mobile, landline and broadband account for 10% off (doest apply to calls and other crap in the fine print). Compared to plans offered by iinet and internode (iinet's not the cheapest either but hosts its own apt repository which is unmetered) telstra's plans are severely overpriced.
Telstra owns all the copper in Australia but thanks to some propper planning and healthy regulation the govenment sets the price that competitors can use this copper. Telstra has been a major stumbling block in the FTTN project (Fibre To The Node) as it wants to enjoy the same monopoly it does now despite the fact that other ISP's and me the Australian Tax Payer also will have paid a share. Under the previous government telstra was hit fairly hard with the regulation hammer for uncompetitive practices and the new government doesn't look like they are going to be any more lenient to Telstra, the Australian government is not as corporate friendly as the US govt. If they even tried filtering ODF files the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) will come down on them like a ton of bricks.
Re:Why is this news ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow, how slightly irritating... (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone from australia who is familar with telstra won't be suprised by this move, they are the biggest bunch of cunts i've ever seen. this same company wanted to charge $32 for shared access to phone lines, and after careful invesgiation our regulartory body here the accc ruled a price of $3 - $9 was the price that still made telstra a profit and allowed competition. telstra were effectively double dipping, charging the customers line rental and charging ISP's using the lines even more for the same thing. they charged these fee's under the guise of maintanence costs, even though 8% or more of phone lines have serious service issues ranging from no dial tone to being so static that a conversation is impossible.
UP and DOWN (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How about forcing their customers too.. (Score:3, Informative)
This from a company that at one stage were disconnecting people from mobile phone service who had terminal illnesses because it was to hard to collect the final bill from the deceased estate, no joke, they are really that low, petty and a truly disgusting company (the real interesting part of that story was how they were able to find out that customers had terminal illnesses).
In Australia friends don't let friends get used by PigPuddle. They instead send them here http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/ [whirlpool.net.au] and give them every opportunity to become an informed customer.
Re:WTF is wrong with Australia? (Score:4, Informative)
Which would be fine if they were not created with tax dollars. Even that would be acceptable at some level if they didn't own the entire damned network as well!
The government, driven by a privatisation ideology, effectively [i]gave away the entire taxpayer funded network to a private company[/i].
Optus are laying a few cables here and there, but the network is effectively Telstra's. The ISPs and other telecom companies pay Telstra, or customers can choose Telstra directly and pay more (oddly they're rarely competitive).
I'd have been thrilled to see the government keep the network and privatise the company. That'd ensure a level playing field. Or privatise the network as a seperate company unrelated to Telstra. That'd fit with their "government stays out of business" mantra, despite the 10 billion dollars Telstra was giving back in profits each year. Either option would have provided real competition in the industry.
Sadly the bozos who ran the Communications Ministry just didn't think any of this would happen. After years of literally retarded IT policy under Richard Alston (well known for a while as the world's biggest luddite), we suffered years of utter inability under Helen Coonan (who drove the privatisation, brilliantly relaxed media ownership to encourage diversity but resulted in less, and recently introduced an Internet filtering app paid for with $80M in tax dollars that was completely hacked in 30 mins by a high school kid). Under the new Labor government, anyone put in the role would be better. I'd argue that random choices made by a die throw or Magic 8-Ball would have given us a better communications industry than we've got now. Surely no-one could do any worse.
Because Telstra have appaling plans. (Score:4, Informative)
Now, that's a fair point...at least it would be if Telstra's plans were not so shockingly bad. As Australia's biggest and most well known ISP/telecom company, they have a huge proportion of Australia's internet users. What a great deal of them don't realise is how much they're being shafted.
My plan:
256/64K (down/up), 12BG download limit, shaped to 64K.
AUD60/month (Which would be somewhere between US45-50, I think)
Not my choice, a family member chose the plan, I wouldn't have been so idiotic. Oh, and did I mention the 24-month contract? Yep, if you cancel your plan, you still pay for the full 24 months after signing the contract.
Consider this vs competing ISPs who offer twice the speed and bandwidth for half the price.
For some other plans with limits, the bastards charge 15c/MB (Which is roughly $150/GB). Imagine you are one of those poor people who were sucked in by Telstra's omnipresence and huge T.V. marketing campaign. OpenOffice is not small, and Telstra's servers are a place where you can get unlimited downloads. You'd be pretty pissed too if they pulled it.
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, what would really benefit the industry here is if Telstra still didn't own all the publicly paid for infrastructure..
Re:Wow, how slightly irritating... (Score:3, Informative)
ADSL isn't everywhere you know, some of us have no choice in the matter.
People should note that the "free" download area provided by Telstra is a selling point of their service and is often used as a defense for their high usage charges, if it is now only Telstra sanctioned files that can be downloaded they have degraded the service without notification.
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:3, Informative)
You missed out the bit in the book that comes in the self install kit about software updates.
Section - usage traps and how to avoid them.
"You should be aware just what your operating system and other software might do automatically. Windows XP, for example, is designed to check for updates on a regular basis - then download them without asking you. (And recent updates have been more than 150MB!) You may want to check your software user guides, and see how to turn this feature off."
Very small monthly quota and a suggestion to turn little features like windows update off.
Re:Other sites? (Score:3, Informative)
There's a point where you're going to have to take your Internet back at gunpoint. These guys are chiselers.
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:5, Informative)
I believe the former became significantly more important than the latter once their largest competitor here launched the Southern Cross Cable Network which gave 300Gbps of bandwidth internationally (compared to Telstra's own 19Gbps) since they were losing customers hand over fist to a competitor who was more in touch with what the customers wanted.
Telstra's monopoly here is so bad, they went from being the forefront of telecommunications (Australia isn't an easy country to provide that kind of service in, Telstra basically invented technologies like ISDN) to being a fat lazy pig with less R&D than your local winery, constantly playing catch-up. They can afford to do that though because they got 30+ years worth of infrastructure for free, and they know their competitors can't compete with that today without the kind of investment nobody is willing to make.
They still claim that 2400bps is more than sufficient bandwidth for your home. Even in the capital city their competitors have to use their exchanges (as wholesale customers) and Telstra under-provide services specifically to either piss you off with their competitor who has to wait on Telstra, or to entice or sometimes force you to use a significantly more expensive service of their own like their wireless broadband (for a time the only provider with that capability). They still charge about 3 times as much as their competitors for that - but they've locked people in to 12-24 month contracts at those exorbitant rates so they don't give a shit.
They have been in bed with Microsoft for so long they have contracted every disease that other most hated company could pass on. They prey on disabled and elderly people, tricking them into plans they can't possibly afford. They go to court to prevent their competitors providing better service. They are even so disorganised internally that they have 4 or more business areas competing against each other for business contracts. Their shopfronts and their call centres use two completely different systems - when forced into paying for their local exchange upgrade via their wireless broadband scam they initially denied my contract because one system claimed I had a bill unpaid for over 8 years! How that got past a tax audit I'll never know. They'll also tell you one thing on the phone and another thing at the shop.
Actually funny story here... I was after a cordless phone package. Remember they're the monopolist so are usually the first port of call unfortunately. They had a whole stack of boxes out the front - at least 15 of them. Not empty display models, the real thing. I took one and asked the saleswiener if I could get one more handset with it. He took the box out the back, spent considerable time, came back without it, and said they didn't have any. I asked if I could just have the standard package then. He said they didn't have any. I looked from him, to the back door he just took one through, to the stack of boxes out the front, and back at him and said something like "you must be joking" and he gave some glib apology. I walked out, into the Myer store next door, got the same package for $70 cheaper.
Basically, they are pathetic evil bastards who need to be choked like Jabba the Hut.
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Because Telstra have appaling plans. (Score:3, Informative)
ADSL2+, 24/1Mbps, 8GB limit on peak (12pm-12am), 32GB other times, $3.00 per GB excess usage, uploaded data not counted, all for $40/month. I won't tell my ISP, or else I'll be accused of advertising for them, but you can see the difference.