John Linton
I read an article yesterday (and I would reference it if I could remember where it was) about grape growers in the irrigation areas giving up their land and moving away to other careers. Some of the people making this radical change are third generation growers who have never known any other working life. This, according to the article, is partly due to the longer term over supply of grapes in the wine making industry, partly because of the fall in value of water allocations and partly due to the amount of incredibly hard work required to produce an increasingly less than reasonable income. It reminded me of of how much the Australian communications industry has changed over the past couple of decades since the Australian Communications Act was promulgated.
When Telecom Australia was the sole supplier of communications services, and even "Telstra Wholesale" was an unheard of concept, life for Australians was much simpler. Then, in the early 1990s, AAP(T) knocked on my door (metaphorically) and offered huge discounts off Telecom Australia's overseas call rates which we could obtain by installing some simple hardware on our telephone lines and save 60% to 90% of our international call bills...which we promptly did. Shortly afterwards Optus was established by a consortium of, then, large Australian companies - none of which had any background or knowledge of telecommunications thus setting a pattern that subsequently created the 'communications industry' in Australia that exists today....a whole bunch of 'telecommunications companies' whose owners and senior management know practically nothing about telecommunications nor how to manage the resources required to deliver it and all of them focussed on making as much money as possible in the shortest time possible.
Undoubtedly Telecom Australia needed to be changed. But it did have many virtues that now no longer exist. Its over staffing allowed country towns and many capital city suburbs to have employees who genuinely went out of their way to help customers with problems and while it may have cost the odd case of beer on occasions line faults that take forever to fix today could be fixed on a Saturday or Sunday with a minimum of cajoling. Also in those days there were no multiple floors of lawyers denying that the company ever did anything at all that would ever cause any customer to complain in the first place or cause anyone who did want to complain to have sell their first born to be able to dispute some outrageous piece of chicanery. While Telstra may have been slower to resolve any sort of dispute in those halcyon days their employees acted with a basic honesty and 'niceness' that is now a distant memory.
With deregulation came a multiplicity of wide boys and spivs who became 'instant' communications companies and along with their inherent dishonesty came so much government regulation it makes it impossible for anyone to understand the bewildering complexity of double talk that government regulated spiv talk spews out of the airways and appears in the press. I defy anyone to actually understand what a mobile telephone hand set or mobile telephone service actually costs them let alone how fast the data service is going to be that they order. So 'deregulation' of the telecommunications industry isn't all upside like it used to be when AAP(T) pioneered, via a loop hole, an alternative to Telecom Australia international call charges.
If you have a moment or two - see if you can come up with the name of an honest and ethical Australian communications company - besides Exetel of course - I can't.
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