StarDestroyer.Net BBS

We've been charging too much

NO FUCKING SHIT. For a mere 25 gigabytes a month you pay $79.95, for fuck's sake. It's just atrocious. I would've changed years ago if not for the fact that the house doesn't take ADSL (because of the damn phone system or some shit, I forget, I have no idea how it works) and all the good, cheap providers do so by way of ADSL.

I was just talking to someone at work today who pays 80 a month for a 6gb plan with Telstra.

NO FUCKING SHIT indeed.

Oh thank christ. It's about bloody time.

You poor poor bastards
Any idea if they are cutting prices to a sane amount? or are you going to see a 10$ price cut instead of a fifty dollar price cut.
Hell my Blackberry has a 25Gig a month plan. That's cell phone internet for 25.99$(US) a month.

Don't get Aussies started on mobile data costs. Those are even more insane.

Also, I'm interested if this will be affecting wholesale pricing too.

I thought Australians had consumer protection or something? Or does that not apply to being hideously overcharged?

I suspect Telstra got away with it because they own a chunk of the infrastructure there, probably courtesy of the Australian government and its half assed competition policies.

General Zod wrote:I thought Australians had consumer protection or something? Or does that not apply to being hideously overcharged?

It's because Telstra is what was formerly a gov't owned telecom provider. Who had an infrastructure monopoly and for a long, long time the monopoly on wholesaling and retailing too.

So, Telstra could set the wholesale and retail prices however it damn well wanted and because until very recently there wasn't any real competition to them on the wholesale side there was no grounds for comparison.

weemadando wrote:

General Zod wrote:I thought Australians had consumer protection or something? Or does that not apply to being hideously overcharged?

It's because Telstra is what was formerly a gov't owned telecom provider. Who had an infrastructure monopoly and for a long, long time the monopoly on wholesaling and retailing too.

So, Telstra could set the wholesale and retail prices however it damn well wanted and because until very recently there wasn't any real competition to them on the wholesale side there was no grounds for comparison.

Telstra's absurd market position won't be a problem for much longer, either, if the Federal Government has it's way.

I'm with iinet and I get twice that for the same price. Telstra's a joke.

I'm with Exetel, and I get 120 gigs for about that price. I also get great customer service most of the time. I also recommend them (and if you mention me when you sign up, I get a free door knob!)

Seriously, fuck Telstra. The government should just seize their assets and turn them public again.

I pay 120 for 120gb of ADSL2 with Netspace and am seriously considering a switch to iiNet based on them having in their "free traffic zone":
iTunes
ABC iView
XBox Live

Which accounts for a decent whack of my monthly usage.

The wholesale pricing that Telstra charges was set by the government... Don't get me started on the complete lack of testicular fortitude Sol demonstrated by not telling Howard where to go jump after the government reduced it's shareholding down to ~35%.

We pay AU$70 for 12GB on a 1.5Mbit plan... and a friend runs a netspace ADSL 2 plan at 55GB @ 20Mbit for only $60

Bring on the national broadband nonsense

I'm currently limited to a Telstra 3G connection - 5GB @ $90p/m yay!

atg wrote:I'm currently limited to a Telstra 3G connection - 5GB @ $90p/m yay!

At least the telstra 3g more or less works.

Minor nitpick; technically Telstra Next G isn't 3g [900mhz] at all.

I feel sorry for you, here in Canada I'm getting 15 Mbps down, 1Mbps up, 100Gb downloads as a soft cap, all for $56 after taxes.

Telstra's dominance in infrastructure was built over decades with taxpayers money as a public utility, it is very difficult for other companies to overcome the barriers to entry. Telstra has to be forced to allow competitors use their infrastructure. If this were a total free market with no competition regulations, Telstra would have wiped out all competition by now.

What did people expect to happen when privatising a virtual monopoly?

Holy fuck, those prices (even the supposedly "reasonable" ones) are fucking insane. I pay 36 euros per month 5MB down, 1 MB up unlimited capacity connection and that kind of pricing is the norm.

When I say 100Gb softcap, I mean soft, we used 240Gb a few times and they were mad that we uploaded a bit past our limit and didn't care about our DL's. I even split my line with 4 roommates and we have no problems, in Australia we'd be done in a heartbeat.

Oh my god, don't get me started on Telstra. Fuck this shit, I'm moving to Korea.

I have a business cable plan for US$59/mo with speeds of 16/2 with an undefined cap (but believed to be somewhere around 750-1000GB/mo)

There are some legitimate reasons historically for why Australians have had to put up with such shitty broadband prices, mainly due to the capacity of undersea cable, and the costs and ROI involved with constructing new ones, something that's not really a concern for all the Americans here, with most of your data transfer being domestic. Having said that, a new undersea cable to Guam was only just completed here, so Telstra would be foolish if they didn't start cutting prices, because their competitors most certainly will be doing their own price cuts in the relatively near future.

I hope the change of power in Washington and the new FCC chairman can prevent this from being the future of internet connections in the US. Those figures are quite insane.