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March 2, 2004
I'm on the road so blogging will be light.
I see from a quick glance at the newspapers that the competition over broadband is hotting up. Optus is now matching Telstra's price cutting to entice Australians to connect to high speed internet services with new entry level services.
Yet the speeds are not that great (256k), the download limit is severe with high excess fees for going over the low limit. The tech support is poor -at best -(50 minutes wait is standard) to deal with the frequent log on difficulties and the DSL cutouts. Basicallly, you are forced to pay more than the $30 per month to obtain a decent service to access music files and images. Even then, because customer failure is built into the system, to keep costs down, you are not going to get reliable customer service.
So the telecommunication industry is signing people up to broadband without providing them with a decent service. It's called fleecing the customer.
Does competition=better service? Competition is supposed to do that, is it not? Competion and shoddy service is what the market delivers. If you want something more you pay more.
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If progress in generated by the unreasonable man, then your the man!
It wasn't that long that you were complaining about your dial up.
It all depends on your perspective. 256k seems slow to you because you wangled that 1.5Mbit connection out of Iprimus. I can assure you it's blazingly quick to those that are used to dial up.
It's competition that brought these improvements. If we had a Telstra monopoly, we'd still be on dial-up modems. As for shoddy service, have you forgotten the days of Telecom Australia?