Monday, January 25. 2010"Does Australia Have The Worst Communications In The World......John Linton
I raise that question simply because whenever I read any 'article' that relates to the Australian communications industry all I see is total nonsense invariably with some screaming headline that, apart from being hysterical, seldom relates to the actual words subsequently written. Annette read me a really good (or should that be bad?) example of such articles yesterday over breakfast. Now admittedly it was from a NSW Sunday tabloid 'newspaper' which itself is only loosely associated with what any other country in the world would think is related to journalism overall but doubtless the people who actually 'read' it take some notice of what it says - I haven't read it for over twenty years and then only for the sports section - I have no idea why Annette reads it but assume that she can't kick the habit of reading something while having breakfast. In any event the article also appears in the on line SMH site here:
Last financial year, total mobile telecommunications revenue increased which I find surprising because I very much doubt that last year's figures are available yet - it's far too early - and I don't see the relevance of a gross revenue figure or even a growth figure as having any relevance to anything. The table at the bottom of the article denies the head line as it simply shows that the 'retail' cost of an SMS is the same as that charged in the UK and the USA. Charges for SMS in SE Asian countries are as relevant as comparing the cost of any other service in Australia to the costs of countries where the base income differentials are so different. However, even that is irrelevant when other quotes in the article point out that the majority of Australian mobile users buy their service using "capped plans" which means the actual prices of SMS (and calls) can't be represented by picking one 'retail' charge for part of a service and then have some cub journalist write a "we're all being ripped off by some dreadful companies" piece of garbage like the cited article. I am not, for one moment, denying that a rate of 25 cents per SMS isn't price gouging of the most disgraceful type - simply that no-one I know would be paying such ludicrously high prices....and I assume no-one who uses a lot of SMS would either. I am pretty sure that building and maintaining a mobile network costs quite a bit of money and I'm equally sure that the people who put up the money for those networks require a realistic commercial return on their investment. For some prat of a 'professor' to make a ludicrous statement like "the cost of carrying an SMS is either free or of miniscule cost" and to have it printed just beggars the imagination - only some twit who has never had a real job in his life can make a claim that a $A4billion+ network can deliver anything for "free". While the cost, depending on the rigour you apply to the calculations, can be very low for sending an SMS, the point is that it is simply a part of an overall pricing matrix that includes giving away hardware (and therefore recovering the cost of that hardware) and, literally, dozens of other call types and service provisions. Now, its quite possible to buy SMS services that allow even a company of Exetel's size to provide a residential user to send an SMS for far less than ten cents a message as a 'stand alone' service (not cross subsidising voice call rates or free hardware etc). In fact Exetel, like several other companies supplies business SMS services at less than 5 cents a message and both the supplier to Exetel and Exetel itself makes a profit on such services... but those customers use tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of SMS a month. Ever since Krudd launched his first raft of lies ("I will deliver 12 mbps of data service to every child in Australia by the end of 2009 or some other speed by some other date....") the Australian press has printed possibly millions of words on just what is happening and will happen in Australian communications and I have serious doubts that not one sentence in all of those millions of words has been either true or has demonstrated any understanding by the writer of the subject he/she tried to address....certainly none of the articles I have read has had a clue. The article cited is appallingly incorrect. The tsunami of words written about Krudd's lies is equally incorrect. It seems to me that Australia's fourth estate is as much use in conveying anything resembling 'truth' in 2010 as the then equivalent of Der Spiegel was in the first half of the 1940s. I think that Australian journalism far outstrips the Australian communications industry for the title of "worst in the world". Trackbacks
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I don't think that as a country we can complain overly much about the mobile landscape. I mean, in many places we are still rolling out sufficient coverage to cover the populations needs, even in urban areas. Sure once we have this and no longer want to upgrade the networks to allow LTE and its sucessors, then SMS would be 'free' for the actual amount of data it is.
I have to agree that the SMH is more a tabloid than newspaper, and this is a trend more papers appear to be following. Eventually we will all just read news.com.au and it will be the best of the worst. Comment (1)
I'm always pleased when I read rubbish in the paper on a subject I know something about.
It reminds me to apply a high level of scepticism to reporting on topics I don't know anything about. Comment (1)
Well given Der Spiegel wasn't first published until after World War II I guess it wasn't conveying an awful lot of truth back then.
But taking your blog to heart excuse me while I go commit hara kiri Comments (3)
Graeme, you exactly demonstrate my point about journalistic accuracy and attention to actuality.......I know when Der Spiegel was founded hence the reference was to its early 1940s "equivalent"....
tch, tch....incorrect scan reading appears to be endemic in Australian journalism!!!! (incidentally: "hara kiri" (sic) is either written (when it is written at all) as either "harakiri" or, if you are in the USA, maybe as "hara-kiri"). Comments (6)
Why don't we try "seppuku" then? Generally speaking, the spelling forms of phonetic translations aren't prescribed but anyhow.
As for Der Spiegel, yes I did pick up your qualification but given that magazine is wholly associated with free Germany why even try and label something completely different as its equivalent? I think the magazine you are looking for is "The Illustrierter Beobachter", which was the official weekly Nazi magazine. Graeme/Grahame Comments (3)
Why not use "...."?
Well, firstly its a casual piece of 'instant' writing done over a cup of coffee and has no need for 'looking up' facts I don't already know....hence the somewhat clumsy (but completely accurate) reference to the most popular English language news publication in Germany and directly relating it to its Third Reich equivalent. Secondly, I think, if you did realise it was reference as you now say, then you were wrong to imply I didn't know that Der Spiegel didn't exist until the 'new version' of Germany....otherwise why would I have written as I did? Surely I would have left the DS reference unremarked? Comments (6)
Just because each SMS message is a very small amount of data, there is a lot of application platform support required to deliver the service.
The fact that you can leave your phone off for a day, still get all the SMS messages sent to you during that time and have delivery reports sent back to the original senders when the message actually lands on the handset isn't something that is "free". Comment (1)
I agree Chris; it seems a common practice for people to think it is somehow 'free' to use billions of dollars of infrastructure to deliver a service.
They are just stupid. Comments (6)
I think you are attacking the wrong people here as much as it is fun to slap the media. I would be asking a question of why ACCAN - the official "peak consumer group" funded and set up by the Federal Government - has chosen to run this campaign now. (It is interesting that ACCAN aren't quoted in the article but my understanding is that they are the ones behind it) That's a question we are trying to get answered right now.
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It was a particularly ill researched and totally stupid 'article' doing nothing for anyone least of all the idiot credited with it.
However it served to point out the unbelievably, ridiculously awful, 'job' the Australian media have lavished on the crazed Krudd's NBN nonsense. As I said, out of millions of words - hard to find a single sentence of any correct meaning. Comments (6)
Grahame,
ACCAN was asked for a comment by the Sunday Age. we said: prices are relatively high, service in Australia is poor, competition between carriers is weak and marketing and consumer information is confusing. Happy to discuss each of those propositions. Allan Asher Comment (1)
Seems you have at least one journo who can see your point of view - @ http://delimiter.com.au/2010/01/26/why-john-lintons-not-that-crazy/
Comment (1)
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