So I moved to Sydney to study Computer Science and Technology at the University of Sydney.

I stayed with my generous uncle for about a month while I found a job and a place to stay.

I have now been living in a share accommodation house with 3 other great people. But my current dilemma is NO INTERNET! That’s why I am writing this post from the university 24-hour access computer lab – while I am meant to be working on my programming assignment, or my group website, or my engineering speech.

I have no interest in using the landline at home to make calls, and neither does any of my flatmates. But in order to sign up for Naked (without dial tone, and subsequently, no Telstra line rental) ADSL2+, I need to have a current active Telstra phone line.

This is one indication of the stranglehold Telstra currently has Australia’s telecommunciations industry in: Say, for example if you don’t use your phone line in your house and you have it disconnected – you need to have it reconnected, and pay a minimum of 1 month’s access and at least a basic Home Phone line plan to Telstra before you can sign up for Naked ADSL with another company. This is due to Telstra’s ownership of telephone exchanges and the way other companies identify local loops in the database with phone numbers.

If you look at Naked ADSL prices at ISP pricing tables, the normal “dial tone” version of this teir is usually $5-$10 cheaper. This is because the cost of your phone line rental to Telstra hasn’t entirely vanished – the ISP supplying you with Naked DSL still must pay for this Unconditional Local Loop: currently $16.75/month, which they pass onto the monthly Naked ADSL charge. Still, this is better value than having to pay for a dial tone to Telstra, plus a normal ADSL plan.

But Telstra has been trying to increase its ULL charge to $30 a month. Luckily, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission rejected this application, as it was deemed uncompetitive. Of course that’s anti competitive! Telstra will do anything it can to hold onto it’s precious copper network, even if than means deliberately driving out competing ISPs by increasing charges like this.

I can’t wait until the whole country is blanketed in tasty optical fibre that’s equally available to all businesses, as proposed by the Federal Government’s National Broadband Network. But by then I will have probably moved to California anyway, so I can only dream.

Tags: ADSL, internet, telstra, uni

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 2:25 am and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.