John Linton ....normal communications services have been restored and normal temperatures require normal winter clothing although the winds are whipping the north end of the harbour to a white capped frenzy and there is only one boat in sight (with a tiny portion of its jib only set) on this glorious sunny winter's day. We had an incident free coast down the mountains back to Sydney earlier this morning having celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary appropriately last night. Somewhere approaching Sydney we marked the precise moment of our marriage thirty years ago before devoting attention to the joys of driving along Parramatta Road on any Sunday.
I caught up with my email and the various automated reports on various aspects of Exetel' activities over the past two days and read some of the communications media reports. One of those reports:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/rivals-up-in-arms-over-telstra-prices-for-use-of-fibre-network/story-e6frg8zx-1226091025193
again just demonstrates how stupid the Australian communications industry has become over the years - assuming that it was ever any different. Firstly let me say that Exetel had customers on the 'old' PSTN services via all three of its carrier providers and, like every other supplier is in the process of transferring those customers to Telstra's new fibre services. Are the prices for these services "too high"? Well....there is no alternative but to either take the Telstra fibre service or use wireless internet. Did anyone expect Telstra to do anything but charge what a monopoly always charges? Move along - nothing to see here.
The other 'story' that seems to be incurring the angst of "the industry" is the new attempts by AFACT to re-engage with ISPs to address illegal downloads via bit torrent et al:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/afact-courts-internet-service-providers/story-e6frgakx-1226090052560
I have never met Mr Gane but I was struck by his likeness to Stupid Stephen in the photograph accompanying the cited article....the same slightly blurred thuggish features and the expression on his face of sneering pugnacity. As I said at the time - it was beyond my comprehension how AFACT's 'leagal team' could have managed to so totally screw up the presentation of an unloseable law suit that they did in fact manage to lose it. Their legal team's ineptitude of presentation being commented on by an appeal court judge telling them that they should have won it and giving them step by step advice on how to do so.
At the risk of yet again annoying some percentage of people who read these ramblings I dislike the thought of Exetel's services being used by people to steal other people's property just as much as I dislike the thought of them being used to promote child pornography. However, in both these particular instances, the remedies proposed by the totally different 'interest groups' concerned are not supported by Australian Federal or State legislation. Exetel received Mr Gane's threatening letter which simply produced a response of telling him to take his infantile bullying somewhere else.
So the industry news, at least in Australia, is once again dominated by the non-news that monopolies price services at monopolistic prices and Australians steal copyrighted material because they can....hold the front page.
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17 - the age I was when I came to Australia