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."
Why do they even try? (Score:2, Insightful)
How about forcing their customers too.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway on with the topic, I have one better then that.
What if the ISP restricted file transfers of
Why stop there? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How about forcing their customers too.. (Score:4, Informative)
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This from a company that at one stage were disconnecting p
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It's not his font, it's whatever font is set in your browser for fixed width content. In other words, it's your font which is too small. Change your browser settings and the font will get bigger (I know because I did so).
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.
own little ecosystem (Score:2)
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I have a plan! I will start an ISP, but I will have my own internal e-mail to protect others from spam! I will have my own content and forums to protect you from spam, kiddy predators, and porn. I will h
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Other sites? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its their storage/local bandwidth that is at stake here, why should they support competing products since one is their own? Or am i missing something key here?
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I believe the issue at hand is that users of this ISP pay per Mb download or are limited by their plan on how much can be downloaded per week/month. It's not a problem of accessing those downloadables, rather a matter of now having those downloadables go against your alloted amount of data use charges when they were once offered "toll free" from the ISP.
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.
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all the best,
drew
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Jesus H. Christ! Just 200 megabytes a month? Sounds like you guys would welcome Comcast or Verizon.
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There's a point where you're going to have to take your Internet back at gunpoint. These guys are chiselers.
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My god that overage fee is high. My ISP just changed its fee/service structure so that Unlimited DSL service is $39.95 Canadian, and DSL with a 200 GB cap is $29.95 (previously the two were both $29.95 and the capped service had a 100G cap). The kicker is that the overage charge with my ISP is 25 cents per GB or 10 cents if you buy it ahead in 100G blocks.
To see Telstra charge for overages at a rate up to 1300 times the rate here in Canada with my ISP is stunning. Just absolutely stunning
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Its their storage/local bandwidth that is at stake here, why should they support competing products since one is their own? Or am i missing something key here?
Isn't Australia one of those backwards countries who still pay per meg downloaded, unless you're downloading off an official ISP server? If so, pulling a 100 meg file might be a few bucks...
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Why is this news ? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are an ISP, if they blocked their customers from reaching http://www.openoffice.org/ [openoffice.org] that would be news.
It's not news... (was Re:Why is this news ?) (Score:2)
Oh, wait.
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Why should we be up in arms about this? Nobody said we should be. There are other reasons to care about events, believe it or not.
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They want to sell more of their product so they take something else out of the front window.
I don't know about that. They're presumably paying the licensing fee to offer ThinkFree to their internet customers, instead of offering OpenOffice for free. Also, we're not talking about the "front window" by any means. They just have a cache of software they provide from their own servers without charging you for the data transfer costs (since they don't have to pay transit). It would cost them basically nothing to leave OpenOffice on that server. I might even buy into a MS backroom deal conspiracy theo
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.
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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.
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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.
Wow, how slightly irritating... (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 r
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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.
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Not really news (Score:2, Insightful)
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So? (Score:2)
Cheers,
Big Pond? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I live north of the equator. Exactly how big is this ISP that they can afford to develop their own office suite?
They're very big, you might know them by the name Telestra. BigPond is a subsidiary and the dominant ISP in Australia. They didn't develop it, they just rebranded ThinkFree after licensing it from Haansoft.
And what is the business plan behind this? Especially since it competes on one side with Microsoft Office and on the other with openoffice.org.
Partly I think it is value added to compete with the other ISPs (they actually have some competition still). They may be selling support and addition services to the business market in the future.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstra [wikipedia.org]
My guess is that they would be comparable to AT&T in terms of how they compete with other products/companies.
Then again, I'm from New Zealand, so don't have a great grasp of either AT&T or Telstra — we do have Telstra[Clear] here, but it's somewhat swamped by our Telec
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Re:Big Pond? (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been complete pricks about the whole thing (selling bandwidth to individuals at a cheaper rate than claim that they are able to sell it to ISPs, creating crazy caps on bandwidth with massive fees for going over, deliberately holding back the rollout of ADSL 2+, etc).
They are widely despised by the Australian internet community. Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates... (I know, I must be a socialist or something, right?)
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Re:Big Pond? (Score:5, Informative)
The immature thing to do. (Score:5, Interesting)
Host THIS: (Score:2)
Personally, I'd call 'em and ask what you're supposed to use for an office suite if their "hosted" solution is down for maintenance, or if the phone company cut one wire too many. Ask if they'd be ready to pay the salary of the average office worker that suddenly can't work.
If not, ask them to send you their copy of OO on any disk they can burn it on. ;)
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Myself, I'd go to the OpenOffice site, click here, [openoffice.org] find the nearest local source for the disk, and contact them for directions....
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They might respond with: "Oh, so you're using our service for business purposes? You'll need to be "upgraded" to our business package for $200/month, here I can adjust your account right now."
Don't be evil (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm really going to trust my data with asshats like this?
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.
I wonder what the ACCC would say (Score:2)
Metered-Unmetered (Score:3, Informative)
What's up with these people? (Score:2)
WTF is wrong with Australia? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Seriously. They seem to be the MOST "anti-consumer-rights" of the so-called "Western" countries. It's just bizarre. Is Australia really a police state? Because that's what it seems like, honestly.
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
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.
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Pardon?
Australians can own and use guns just not automatics, semi-automatics or handguns in most cases. They also need to be licensed but anyone with even half a brain and an understanding of gun safety can get a license. The last big tightening of gun laws came after 35 people were killed at the Port Arthur Massacre.
I'm a shooter and I like the Australian gun control laws. I feel much safer about people with
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I have never had an instance in my life, or those I've known, where a gun has or would have protected them. The closest story is an attempted break-in where shouting to the person that they had a gun and were calling the cops caused the person to forget about it and flee... (in that case they didn't even have a gun)
I
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:5, Informative)
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"The action also seems to be driven by a lack understanding of what BigPond Office is actually about. As a hosted online application, BigPond Office is useful for people who want to access their documents from different machines; it's not really a viable alternative to Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. BigPond Office is competing with the likes of Google Docs, and is really only of interest to BigPond users who can access BigPond Office without using up
Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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Well, we're not all with Telstra. Most ISPs have their own content mirrors which are unmetered traffic for their customers. While all the ISPs do have to pay Telstra for bandwidth out to the exchanges at typical monopolistic rates, for end-users at other ISPs OOo will continue to be a free download from their ISP's mirror. And Telstra's customers are probably too stupid to know any better anyway (I say probably because there are some cases where using BigPond (Telstra's retail arm) makes sense, but they're
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Slightly less net neutral than before.
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: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.
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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:5, Informative)
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Say, about that, how do they diffrentiate between solicited and unsolicited traffic? I mean, if I decided to send a whole bunch of packets to some poor Telstra subscriber, would they actually be charged for those packets? Or is their entire network firewalled and inaccessible from the outside world?
The very idea that anyone on the internet could decide the size of your next bill would make a metered ISP a very dubious proposition imo.
UP and DOWN (Score:3, Informative)
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They own the copper. No justification just a government enforced monopoly for what is now a private body run by what appears to be the dregs of US telco management.
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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
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So, I guess downloading OO from somewhere else counts against your time and i assume costs money. Before they pulled it, it was free to fetch.
sucks to be them.
Telstra BigPond's usage meter rates... (Score:2)
...are available here [bigpond.com].
Looks like plans capped at anywhere from 200MB to 60GB per month, with a $0.15/MB (AUD, not USD) overage charge on some plans. On one plan (Liberty plan), they severely throttle your bandwidth once you hit the limit.
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Also... (Score:2)
I have an easier to remember url [justfuckinggoogleit.com] for that
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http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansandoffers/default.jsp [bigpond.com]
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Are you volunteering to pay for the bandwidth consumed? Are you unfamiliar with the concept of "metered" access? Did you miss the part of TFA which pointed out that once upon a time, Telstra customers could download OO.o without burning into their prepaid bandwitdth quota, but now they can't, and the reason this has happened is that Telstra feels threatened by OO.o?
Yeah, I thought so. This is /.; it's easier to whip out a quip than actually read and comment intelligently.
Now comes the part where you sideste
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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 reall
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I guess it's beneficial for users with a really low and strictly-enforced monthly download limit.
Which unfortunately describes every Bigpond user out there. They have a choice between metred @ 15c/MB or shaping down to 64k once they hit the quota associated with their monthly bill. Luckily there are hundreds of other ISPs around, but the concept of unlimited internet is nonexistent thanks to Telstra owning most of the infrastructure from the last mile copper to the overseas cables. They are abusive monopolists, and when they make decisions like this can be as callous and petty as they like.
Re:Confusing article title (Score:5, Insightful)
Bandwidth caps in Australia are on every ADSL plan. This is usually because the bandwidth costs to the ISP are quite heavy compared to the USA. Most content comes from the US (google, youtube, yahoo etc) and so Telstra (owner of Bigpond) gets to set monopoly prices. To make the bandwidth cap a little more palatable, many (most) ISP's mirror content or large files on servers on their networks so there is no impact on their running costs. In a competitive move, Telstra/Bigpond have done the same thing.
Why Telstra thinks that removing OO from their unmetered server is going to gain them any kudos is a mystery. However, if you put on your monopoly management hat, you can see why. In this case I'd say it's purely evil (tm) as the competitive advantage of not having OO downloadable is next to nothing.
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Enter the competing product. Does it really make sense to put effort into making your competitors products easier to get? If they didn't already have OO.org in the d/l area, They certainly wouldn't be well advised to ad
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Re:Bunch of Kangaroos! (Score:5, Interesting)
Their upper levels of management are now exclusively from the USA in the odd half privatised government telco with no government control that is Telstra. The locals are actually refered to as "savages" by some managers. There is a certain type of US manager that goes wild overseas and needs to be chained to a personal lawyer 24/7 to stop them doing stupid and illegal business practices. Some of the latest gems that were implemented is making employees wear voice recorders all day at work (illegal to record the customers they talked to and recorded without consent without a warrant) to be reviewed by management later - credit card numbers and all. There was also the incident of firing a woman on the grounds of morality for activites outside work hours (illegal), and not firing the two men she was with - a little bit of Taliban mixed with a desire to own employees like slaves in that managers head.
Don't take this as an anti-US rant - the entire country is not made up of executives that act like Banditos.
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