[COLUG] Time Warner bits and bytes and aircards too

[Duane]

charles morrison wrote:

> Much as I had government intervention, this industry needs regulation.
> We all accept that fact that when we buy a gallon of gasoline we get a
> gallon of gasoline and there are stiff penalties for dealers caught
> cheating with the measure.

After spending some time in the US and having to deal with these issues
on both sides of the Pacific, while it might seem like some things in
Australia are more expensive, I'm just glad we don't have to resort to
lawyers (Sorry Russ!) every time some (company|bank|.*) decides to screw
some over for their own mistakes.

We have govt. bodies (accc.gov.au) and quasi govt. bodies (tio.com.au)
to fall back on when in dispute with phone and internet companies.

In this case the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission)
has taken several companies (including Telstra - Large incumbent telco,
previously govt owned, currently has 100% ownership of copper Australia
wide) through court on behalf of others because of misleading/false
advertising.

For example, no broadband companies here advertise 24Mbit ADSL2+
connections, even though this is possible in some cases where you are
under a mile from the nearest exchange, Telstra went and did a heap of
TV advertising that was completely misleading and got dealt with
accordingly. There was a determination either with a settlement, or
court decision that 20Mbit was more likely for various reasons, over
contended links both at the ISP and backhaul from the exchange to the
ISP, old copper causing degraded signals etc etc etc.

Also due to economies of scale etc etc etc, the cost of bandwidth to
both consumers and on a wholesale basis is a tad expensive, and most/all
internet plans have a fixed limit per month, and then you usually have
the option of being capped between 64kbit and 256kbit or paying excess.

Most of Telstra's plans only have excess and a few yrs ago it came out
that 1/3rd of their profit was from excess fees, anyways I'm getting
side tracked.

A lot of companies offering capped plans were advertising as "Unlimited"
with all the fine print in the world, and the ACCC took a few of the
bigger ones through court over this and now virtually no one advertises
unlimited plans that aren't truly unlimited.

That said, until DSL/VoIP came along we seriously got shafted on phone
calls.

Although from articles lately capping etc seems to go on in the US as
well (comcast), unlike the US very few areas (by geographical size) have
access to cable internet, so most people are on DSL. I was actually
surprised at the area covered by cable companies, cable tv/net only
happened in Australia in the 90s.

-- 

Best regards,
 Duane

http://www.freeauth.org - Enterprise Two Factor Authentication
http://www.nodedb.com - Think globally, network locally
http://www.sydneywireless.com - Telecommunications Freedom
http://e164.org - Because e164.arpa is a tax on VoIP

"In the long run the pessimist may be proved right,
    but the optimist has a better time on the trip."