“Monopoly”, it’s not just a board game anymore…
Today, throughout Australia, ADSL and dialup internet users were unexpectedly disconnected at 9AM. It didn’t matter who you were, what ISP you were with or who your carrier was. If you were online, you went oflfine. If you were offline, you stayed that way.
‘How can this be?‘ I hear you cry. ‘Surely there must be enough carriers in Australia to guarantee best-path determination? How could all those ISPs have a fault all at the same time?‘
All this happened becuase in Australia there really is only one carrier. They own all the lines. They own all the exchanges. They own all the DSLAMs.
They are Telstra Hell$tra and they reign supreme, unfortunately.
Today Telstra experienced a failure in their internet exchange servers, or something not unlike that. That alone managed to take out half of Australia’s internet capabilities. Then in the course of fixing this they managed to knock the rest of the servers offline and take out the rest of Australia. Lovely… my connection died just in time for me to miss most of today’s Dragonhunt session. Telstra yet again manage to prove why they are a good example case for the strengthening of anti-trust laws.
Yes, technically what Telstra holds is a monopoly, and therefore illegal under Australian law, but we really have to look at two facts:
- Telstra is owned by the government
- Who, really, is going to pay the billions of dollars out to build hundreads of thousands of new exchanges and lay millions of kilometers of cable in order to break Telstra’s monopoly?
Number 1 is just a fact of life, and the answer to number 2 is: no one. At least, not as far as I can see.
This post started off as a rant, but I’ve just realised I really don’t have the energy, time or inclination to rant right now, so I’m just going to let this one go and trawl news sites for something blogworthy.
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