Ian McPhee wrote:
I heard about that and am horrified - went around tassie recently and the
CDMA worked almost all over - my friend (ex telecom) phone was all but
useless. Is it time to contact Barnaby Joyce? Notice recently Nigel Andews
had an old Hyundai CDMA and I asked how come you have that - He said "it
workes everywhere and I just leave it prepaid" which I find has no time
limit. He had a GSM for regular use.
You'll note that CDMA coverage at the moment is inferior to the old
AMPS coverage from the mid 1990's too, so the disappearance of CDMA is
really two steps backwards, not one.
Contacting Barnaby Joyce will be of little value. Barnaby Joyce's party
voted to privatize Telstra, and the flip-side of that is that Telstra is
now a commercial organization making decisions on the basis of commercial
imperatives, because that's what private companies do. Folks like me
warned that this kind of thing would happen, and I'm sure there'll be
more of it in the future, but the kind of people who vote for Government
asset sales don't tend to take kindly to arrogant bastards saying, "I
told you so," when it all turns pear-shaped afterwards :-)
For what it's worth, Telstra is currently engaging in some political
posturing of its own, and is attempting to make use of the aforementioned
commercial imperatives to get the regulatory landscape changed (and the
changes, I might add, will have the effect of making it even easier to
do this kind of stuff in the future). Any public announcements Telstra
makes in the present environment really need to be taken with a grain of
salt. We're all just waiting for the big ACCC smackdown, but until that
happens you can expect Telstra to continue to make irrational and
abusive threats against its customer base, then say the Government's
regulatory system is giving it no alternative. It's all part of creating
public support for tearing-apart the regulatory system. Don't be sucked-in
by it.
Where do we start - what people want in country is a service and not bells
and whistles and I understand GSM is not much use beyond 32km and besides
CDMA does not interfer with aviation radio like GSM!
There are some technical and economic realities around telecommunications
which people in regional areas need to face up to.
They voted for political parties which would privatize Telstra after
swallowing the line that it was theoretically possible for communications
services in the bush to be equivalent to those in the city. "We'll set
aside a few billion for regional telecommunications," said the Government,
"if you let us sell-off Telstra for ideological reasons!"
In practice achieving city-style telecommunications in the bush requires
massive, unprecedented capital investment. And private corporations
never make capital investments without expecting a return; And they
can't get returns in the bush because the population density isn't
high enough to provide the income stream needed to pay for the required
infrastructure.
So turning Telstra into a private corporation in charge of telecommunications
in the bush was 100% the wrong answer. If you want quality, you aren't
going to get it now. Not from Telstra, anyway.
As I said above, you can expect a hell of a lot more than this in future
years. There's no point crying about it now; If Australia wanted the
public interest to override the profit motive in rolling out telco
services in the bush then it shouldn't have voted in a political party
that was ideologically opposed to public ownership of telecommunications
companies. The bed has been made, now is the time to lie in it.
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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