This case has interesting implications. Originally, Justice Steve Rares said, effectively, that someone using a recorder-in-the cloud was still making a personal copy for domestic purposes. The fact that they’re using a recording device that’s provided as a service rather than sitting on the shelf under their television is irrelevant. The Full Court is saying, effectively, that the cloud provider is complicity in the action, which means it’s no longer personal, and in some cases may even be the sole actor.

This interpretation could have massive implications for providers of other cloud services. Could they be found to be copying data that they’re not entitled to? I’m no lawyer, so don’t ask me. But I can at least see that the law is having to deal with situations that are very different from the circumstances imagined when it was written.

Paragraph 100 of the Full Court’s decisions does say:

We should emphasise that our concerns here have been limited to the particular service provider-subscriber relationship of Optus and its subscribers to the TV Now Service and to the nature and operation of the particular technology used to provide the service in question. We accept that different relationships and differing technologies may well yield different conclusions to the “who makes the copy” question.

Will this decision be appealed? You bet.

Last night I spoke about the decision and its implications with Dom Knight on ABC Local Radio nationally — well, except for the analog transmitters that were broadcasting the cricket. I also spoke about the material I presented yesterday at DigitalMe in Perth.

[Update: I just noticed that there's a couple of little audio gaps. I was recording off the stream, y'see. I'll fix them later.]

Personally, I stand by what I said in the opinion piece I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald in February: Sport has to think outside the box.

If you’re in Perth today, the DigitalFamily event starts at 1000 local time at Northbridge Piazza. It’s free.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but as usual I’m posting it here as an archive.

Also on the program was Fiona Phillips, acting CEO of the Australian Copyright Council, so we had me as the technologist and her as the lawyer.

I think Mr Delroy was surprised to find that we were in broad agreement on most issues. We covered quite a bit of territory, including SOPA, Optus versus sport, new business models and the inevitable mention of Nine Inch Nails.

Here’s the recording of the whole thing, including the talkback calls.

I’d also like to thank everyone on Twitter who suggested other creatives who were successfully bypassing the middlemen and publishing straight to their audiences: musicians Radiohead, Amanda Hocking, Amanda Palmer, Jonathan Coulton and OK Go; writers Stephen King and Cory Doctorow; comedian Louis CK; and even the movie Red State by Kevin Smith. Have I missed any?

The audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The program is also available as an MP3 from the ABC website.

If you’re new to the story, well, there’s a summary and links in my post from Tuesday and my opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Last night I ended up talking about it on Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa. I held the slight fear that I’d be on a sports program as token representative of The Evil Internets. But as it happens, presenter Will Goodings took us through a rather balanced discussion.

As an aside, I was amused to see how an editorial in The Australian described the federal court decision.

Last week’s landmark Federal Court ruling that Optus can record and re-broadcast sporting events “near live” without breaching copyright…

The court decided no such thing. It decided that individuals could make their “private and domestic” recordings using Optus’ service rather than their own equipment. It certainly didn’t give Optus permission to “re-broadcast” anything, at least within any meaning of the word “broadcast” used by people on this planet.

Still, hats off to The Australian for a lovely bit of propaganda in support of their sporting interests. Remember who owns the National Rugby League…

The audio is ©2012 dmgRadio Australia, but here it is ‘cos it hasn’t been posted on the radio station’s website. Besides, this is a reasonable plug.

Last week federal court judge Justice Steven Rares ruled that Optus’ TV Now service, which allows customers to record free-to-air TV and have it streamed back to their smartphone, tablet or computer at a more convenient time, was a legal form of time-shifting under section 111 of the Copyright Act 1968.

Even if competing telco Telstra had a supposedly-exclusive deal with the Australian Football League (AFL) to stream live video coverage of matches to smartphones. Even if the delay between an Optus customer starting to record a game and playing it back was just two minutes.

Telstra is paying the AFL $153 million over five years for this now-not-so-exclusive streaming right. Optus pays the AFL nothing, because they’re just providing a technical service through which individual customers make their own “solely for private and domestic use” recordings.

Josh Taylor covered it for ZDNet Australia.

The Sydney Morning Herald commissioned me to write an opinion piece that was published this morning, Sport has to think outside the box. Do please read it. It seem to have struck a chord, because I’ve received a lot of compliments.

Then the ABC’s Linda Mottram asked me to chat about the issues on 702 Sydney. And here’s the audio, along with her subsequent chat with a talkback caller on the same topic.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But these program items usually aren’t archived on their website so here it is. And I will of course suggest that you listen to Linda Mottram’s morning program regularly.

I’m thinking of writing up some of my thoughts on how future sporting coverage could be done technically. Meanwhile, do you feel as I do that the days of cashed-up major sporting codes are about to end?

[Update 8 February 2012, 1015: The Sydney Morning Herald has published a follow-up piece this morning by rugby legend Roy Masters. Court has gambled with codes' futures. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to draw me a diagram of what the fuck he's talking about.]

Over at Crikey I’ve written a summary of what’s happening with Australia’s internet filter.

Australia’s mandatory internet filtering by internet service providers (ISPs) won’t happen for at least two years. But we’re getting filtering anyway. Voluntarily. By ISPs. Next month…

Telstra and Optus are expected to have their filters ready within weeks, although the situation with Primus is unclear…

The Internet Industry Association (IIA) is also about to release a voluntary industry code that would see an estimated 80% to 90% of Australian internet connections filtered by the Interpol blacklist over the next year. Attempts to access domains on the list would be redirected to an Interpol block page.

Overall, I reckon the process that’s now unfolding could well result in the gvernment’s planned mandatory ISP-level filtering disappearing off the table entirely.

As a bonus link, here’s Interpol’s explanation of their “worst-of” blacklist of child exploitation material.

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. With three full working days occupied by conferences, I still managed to get a few things done. And not all of it was drinking.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 78, “Bionic eyes, gigabit Wi-Fi and the NBN”. This is my wrap-up of the NICTA Techfest, including an interview with Dr Terry Percival, one of the inventors of Wi-Fi, about potential future uses of the National Broadband Network. He reckons video will be the killer technology, with the world returning to non-written communication as the norm.

Articles

• Build the NBN, but be careful of the detail: Optus boss, for Crikey. Some of what Optus CEO Paul O’Sullivan had to say at the Kickstart Forum on Sunday.
• Journo shield law covers bloggers, independent media, for Crikey. The Evidence Amendment (Journalists’ Privilege) Bill 2010 was originally intended to give protection only to employee-journalists. Simple but effective amendments by The Greens extended protection to everyone who publishes news or commentary in any medium.

Media Appearances

• This week’s edition of the Business 21C Weekly podcast from Sydney community radio station 2SER was all about the Australian government’s plans for internet censorship, and I was one of the guests. The program also features web developer Scott David from Flock and the president of the Internet Society of Australia, Tony Hill.

Corporate Largesse

• The Kickstart Forum on the Gold Coast continued on Monday and Tuesday. My airfares and accommodation were paid for by the organisers, Media Connect. Monday’s lunch was sponsored by Samsung. There was also plenty of freebies from the vendors, though notably less than last year. And substantially fewer USB memory sticks. Should I bother reporting all this stuff? If nothing else, it’s interesting to document for posterity.
• On Thursday I attended the Digital Directions 2011 conference as their guest. They provided food and drink. Stories relates to the event will appear next week.
• The lovely folks at Saasu — well, their CEO Marc Lehmann — decided to give me a three-month extension on my subscription, just as a gift. I’d still say it’s a delightful online accounting system even without that.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: The view this morning from the front door of Tea Tree Cottage, one of the Bunjaree Cottages at Wentworth Falls, where I'm living this week. I'll write more about this experience very soon.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and places — and what a productive week it has been!

Articles

• You know super-fast ain’t so super: Optus, and…
• ACCC says Optus pitch is misleading, for ZDNet.com.au, both covering the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s case in the Federal Court in Sydney against Singtel Optus for allegedly misleading or deceptive advertising. I particularly like Optus’ lawyer saying that broadband is not a bottle of shampoo, and the argument that even if an advertisement is technically misleading in and of itself this can still be “cured” with more information later in the sales process. The judge’s decision is expected early in the coming week.
• Turnbull v Conroy: how Coalition broadband plan stacks up, for Crikey, comparing the Coalition’s new broadband policy with the Labor government’s National Broadband Network.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 62, “Why can’t Labor sell the NBN’s benefits?”. I reckon that Labor has been crap at selling the concept of the NBN. After running through the week’s NBN-related political news, I cover some ideas for broadband applications that might help sell the thing.
• A Series of Tubes episode 118. Karl Horne from Ciena talks about that company’s views on traffic growth and network architecture, and I rabbit on about the spate of anti-NBN scare stories in The Australian, the new USO (Universal Service Obligation) inquiry, and the ACCC’s proposed inquiry into ADSL wholesale service prices.

Media Appearances

• On Monday I was interviewed by community radio’s current affairs program The Wire about the NBN. An audio file is available.
• On Wednesday I did a quick spot on ABC Radio Statewide NSW with Paul Turton, covering the ACCC v Singtel Optus hearing and also the death of Limewire’s file sharing service. It wasn’t recorded, sorry.
• On Friday I was interview by Melbourne’s SYN Radio about — you guessed it! — the NBN. I’ll see if I can get hold of an audio file.

Geekery

• We finished a batch of updates for the website at Nolans Road, including adding the new home page and some pages for Dee Nolan’s lush new book, A Food Lover’s Pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostela. Nothing earth-shattering, just some routine updates to an existing site.

Corporate Largesse

• HTC threw a more-than-adequate BBQ with plenty of drinks for the Australian launch of the HTC Desire HD smartphone. The venue was the Astral Bar and Restaurant at Star City Casino.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Sydney CBD at dusk, taken from the Astral Bar and Restaurant on level 17 of the Star City Casino in Pyrmont.]

I’m reviewing the HTC Desire smartphone as part of the Telstra HTC Desire Social Review program.

Telstra has given 25 people, including me, a free HTC Desire handset as well as a bunch of credit on their Next G mobile network to provide “a mix of opinions and perspectives” on this so-called “superphone”.

Before we received our phones, we were asked to explain our expectations of the Desire. “We will be interested to compare this to your thoughts after the review,” said Telstra.

Here’s what I said:

HTC Desire is a “superphone”, eh? It should therefore integrate quickly and reliably into my workflows, and have the grunt to last a long working day. I reckon it could replace my laptop for staying in touch, coordinating my business and gathering media when I’m away from my desk. Android‘s meant to be “open”, so it should let me do things the way I want. I should beat my current Nokia N96 in every way.

Us reviewers will be using the hashtag #telstradesire so you can find our tweets, and Telstra will lead our discussions through a series of posts at Ben Bevins’ blog starting on Wednesday.

I’ve only just started to use the Desire. But here’s my initial impressions, along with a bit more information about what I hope to be able to do.

First up, despite the annoying hype about the Desire being an “iPhone killer” — why does everything have to be expressed in terms of mortal combat? — I won’t be comparing it with the iPhone. Mostly because I don’t have an iPhone. I also figure there’ll be other reviewers doing that particular comparison.

What I will be doing is seeing how much day-to-day work and play can be done on the Desire, leaving my MacBook Pro untouched.

Obviously there’s plenty the Desire won’t be suitable for, such as writing long articles and editing podcasts. But I’m guessing it’ll be fine for my extensive use of Twitter, quickly checking email and some routine web browsing. It’ll be interesting to see whether it can be used for lengthy reading sessions, managing my business through Basecamp, Kayako SupportSuite, Saasu for accounting, and WordPress and cPanel for the various websites I maintain.

I’ll also be seeing how good the camera is, for both stills and video.

I fired up the Desire, so to speak, on Friday and used it randomly for two days. My impressions?

1. The industrial design is good. The Desire sits neatly in the hand. The only annoyance is that I keep hitting the volume control with my left thumb. Maybe I’m holding it wrong.
2. There is no HTC synchronisation software for Mac, only Windows. Grrr. Have they just assumed that Mac owners will automatically get an iPhone and thrown in the towel?
3. The 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor is nominally four time as fast as the Dual ARM 9 264MHz in my N96, but the Desire feels much faster than that. Scrolling is fast, smooth and responsive, as is zooming in and out of web pages.
4. The built-in Twitter client, HTC Peep, didn’t seem capable of managing my heavy Twitter usage. I’ve installed the official Twitter for Android client and I’m much happier.
5. I’m so pleased to be back on the fast, reliable Next G network, rather than the shoddy Optus network through my current provider Virgin Mobile. Using the two networks side by side while on the train on Friday, Next G was there — even through some tunnels — while Optus dropped back back to 2G or even no connectivity at all in some railway cuttings.
6. I’m worried about battery life. Even with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and GPS turned off, it took just five hours for the battery level to drop to 50% when out and about yesterday. That’s a bunch of Twitter and occasional web browsing over drinks. Maybe I can manage the power better.
7. Browsing the Android Market is clear and simple, as is downloading and installing apps. Google Maps was the second download after Twitter for Android, and again the software is fast and responsive.
8. I’ve set up one email account to use IMAP to synchronise back to my own server at Prussia.Net. It only synchronises the Inbox, not the Sent mail. I moved an email to Trash, but it disappeared entirely. This doesn’t inspire confidence.

I’m about to travel across town for dinner, and I’ll play along the way. And tomorrow will be my first workday with the Desire. So to speak. That name is just so lame. I’m not sure whether I’ll migrate the rest of mye email just yet, but we’ll see how I go with everything else.

[Disclosure: I have been given a HTC Desire handset by Telstra free of charge to review. The comments expressed by me reflect my user experience and personal opinion.]

Labor Party dissent over internet censorship goes public. Shock horror: modern vigilantes use Facebook. And the interim Premier of New South Wales says a precedent is not actually a precedent.

Ladies and Gentlemen, despite the appalling service of the #badoptus network, here is episode 2 of The 9pm Edict. Finally.

You can listen to this episode below. But if you want them all, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission.]

This is the hardware I’m taking to Africa for Project TOTO for ActionAid Australia, courtesy of our supporters. While I’ve said before that social media is about the people not the tools, this kind of support is great. So, what’s in the picture?

In the back row there’s a pair of laptops to leave in Tanzania, thanks to Lenovo Australia: a refurbished ThinkPad R61 (left) and a brand new ThinkPad X200 (right). I’ll review the X200 at the end of our mission. Both are running Windows Vista Business.

In the front row, from left to right:

• My own Nokia N96, to which we can compare the size of everything else. (It’s about the same size as an iPhone, Mark.)
• A Thuraya SO-2150 satellite phone from Optus, thanks to Internode who are paying the bills. Yes, that tiny little thing is a satellite phone!
• A Motorola MotoRazr V3xx multimedia phone, and
• An LG KF700Q multimedia phone, both thanks to Telstra, and both of which stay in Tanzania.
• A Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbook running Windows XP, again thanks to Lenovo Australia, which is what I’ll be using instead of my usual MacBook Pro while I’m on the road. I’ll write about that experience as I go. However I’m very nervous about not having my usual computer with all its software loaded, and I still have to transfer my workflows to that system tonight.

So, some questions…

We’ll be able to pair the two phones to the two ThinkPads for ActionAid International Tanzania. Our blogs are running on WordPress. So they can quickly catalog their photos and videos and upload them, what tools would you recommend for the job? Remember, this is running Vista, and while I personally would consider switching to Ubuntu Linux, there isn’t time and Vista is what they already support in their office.

And as for me, running Windows XP and wanting to throw something together quickly tonight, what would you recommend?

We also talk about YABS (yet another broadband statistic), Twitter and Iran, and of course Project TOTO. Tubes also talks to Alcatel-Lucent’s Geof Heydon about the NBN: it’s more than just a fast Internet connection.

Over the last few months, I’ve been trialling Telstra’s Next G mobile broadband as part of an experimental “technology seeding program”. Despite my initial doubts, I’ve been impressed.

Previously I’d been using Vodafone 3G, tethering my MacBook Pro via Bluetooth to a Nokia N80. It worked just fine. I subsequently moved to a Nokia N96 and Virgin Mobile, which uses the Optus network under the hood. It’s terrible. I made a big mistake.

But that’s a story for another time…

Sure, Next G is the most expensive mobile broadband out there. But it’s also the best. Clearly.

On our road trip, we could use Next G almost all the way from Cowra back through Bathurst to Sydney. Yes, the signal dropped out as we drove through hilly areas, as you’d expect. But the data link automatically reconnected once it found a new cell — with the same IP address!

Seriously. Here I was in a moving car, running a ping and watching YouTube videos. The link dropped out. It reconnected. And when it did, perhaps six minutes later when the terrain sorted itself out, the video started playing from where it left off. Pings resumed with the very next packet number in the sequence — albeit with ping times of over 370 thousand milliseconds.

In another test, the data link kept the same IP address while I caught a train from Newtown across Sydney Harbour to Pymble. In CityRail’s loop under the Sydney CBD, there was no signal in the tunnels, but the link came back up within seconds of arriving at a station.

Somebody did some great network engineering. They deserve a pat on the back.

But what else?

The Good:

• Next G is fast. My card was set to use HSUPA, i.e. increased upload speed at the expense of downloads. In central and inner west Sydney, I consistently got 6Mb/s download and sustained 1M/s upload. The network was nominally rated at 14Mb/s
• Coverage is good. As an example, we got a clean data link while 7km out of Cowra in a location where Vodafone was marginal and Hutchison/3 was dead.
• Dropouts were minimal. I could rely on being able to do sustained uploads or downloads.

The Bad:

• It takes two attempts to connect. PPP authentication usually times out on the first attempt. It’s usually fine on the second. But it is irritating.
• The Mac user interface is pig ugly and lacks vital features. This isn’t directly Telstra’s fault. Sierra Wireless, who make the card, need a good hard slap. There’s simply no excuse for not providing a full-featured Mac interface for a mobile product. Telstra, please make that a selection criterion!
• Occasionally, you’ll roam to 3′s network. There’s a peering agreement whereby 3 Mobile users roam to Next G cells when their own aren’t available — great outside the major cities. But the downside is that you can also roam off Next G to 3 if you’re closer to a 3 cell — as shown in the picture. Apparently you can turn off this feature by setting the card to only use Next G’s 850MHz frequencies — but that option isn’t available in the Mac interface, only Windows. The card is now stuck on 3 and I can’t change it back. Fail.

The Unknown:

• What’s the customer service like? I dealt directly with a Telstra market development manager, so I was spoilt. If you use Next G, do you also get Telstra’s traditionally-shitful customer service? I have no idea.

Yes, Next G is one of those cases where you get what you pay for. But if you want to actually use mobile broadband instead of swearing at it, it’s probably worth the cost.

Dear Optus, Vodafone and 3, if you’d like me to re-visit my opinions of your own products, I’m more than happy to give them a trial too. You know where to find me.

[This story was originally written for Crikey, where it was published on 12 January 2009. I've linked to it previously Here it is in full, along with a wonderful follow-up comment from a Telstra PR guy and my extremely snarky reply.]

Confused by Telstra’s rejected low-cal bid for the National Broadband Network? Let’s stir some new jargon into the stew: “DOCSIS 3″ and “dark fibre”. Suddenly Telstra’s strategy makes sense — for Telstra — but it delays the rollout of high-speed broadband even further. Again.

DOCSIS 3 is a new system for cable internet which increases speeds from the current 17Mbit per second of BigPond Cable (30Mbit in Sydney and Melbourne) to 100Mbit or more. Last week Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo revealed that the technology is being deployed, but implied that it won’t be offered until they’re forced to by a competitor’s actions.

“We have [DOCSIS 3] as an option if somebody chooses to compete and to compete with us,” he told a conference in Phoenix.

“The only difference is we’ll be there a lot quicker a lot faster a lot bigger, a lot more integrated and with more capabilities than anybody else.”

How does Telstra do it quicker? By quietly stashing away its secret weapons, ready to be unleashed when a competitor tried to deploy their own big guns. Remember how Telstra didn’t sell ADSL2+ broadband, even from exchanges where equipment was already installed, until ISPs like iiNet started selling their own ADSL2+?

This time Telstra will do it quicker by using dark fibre — optical fibre cable that’s already in the ground but not yet “lit up” by the data-carrying laser beams.

Any telco with half a brain has dark fibre. If you’re digging expensive trenches, it doesn’t cost much to drop in a few extra cables while you’re at it. In the late 1990s, before the Dot-Com Bubble burst, demand was predicted to continue soaring. Telstra laid in plenty of spare capacity.

“There’s nothing imaginary about the many hundreds of kilometres of dark fibre out there,” writes former Telstra Wholesale employee “TerraMatt”.

“Telstra’s NDC division was so busy installing that new-fangled ‘fibre’ thing that companies like John Holland and (was it?) VisionStream were contracted to keep up.” And then there were start-ups like COMindico, many of whom went broke or. COMindico’s assets were bought up by SP Telemedia (now Soul Australia). What happened to the other networks?

According to TerraMatt, there’s dark fibre from the Pilbara to Perth and Kalgoorlie, Warrnambool to Geelong and Melbourne. Even Mt Gambier has fibre optic cable sitting there.

“It’s kind of like rats,” he says.

“There’s bound to be some fibre optic cable within about six feet of you…”

The rejection of their NBN bid is a great outcome for Telstra. They can pretend to fight the decision in the courts, delaying the release of that $4.7 billion of taxpayers’ largesse to their competitors. Meanwhile, Telstra gains a few more months to polish their 100Mbit DOCSIS 3 cable for capital cities and their to-be-announced-any-time-now 21Mbit Next G wireless broadband upgrade everywhere else — all joined together by Sol doing a quick “Fiat Lux!” on the dark fibre.

[Disclosure: Stilgherrian receives free Next G access from Telstra Country Wide as part of a technology seeding program.]

And after that was published…

There’s reader comments on the original piece from Monday and in the next day’s “Comments, corrections, clarifications, and c*ckups” column — the latter including the claim from a former Optus Vision contractor that Optus’ dark fibre network could be even bigger than Telstra’s. And the day after.

However the real fun started on Thursday…

Telstra spinner Rod Bruem writes: Re. “Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again” (Monday, item 1). Who is this “Stillgherrian” [sic] and why do you let him post reports on Crikey anonymously? His rants and raves are certainly not of the calibre of the legendary Hillary Bray. Could you please explain the rationale to your loyal readers?

The Hillary Bray he refers to isn’t the James Bond character, but political commentator Christian Kerr, who used to write for Crikey anonymously to keep secret his links with former Liberal senators. He now writes for The Australian.

What caught me, though, was Rod Bruem’s “own goal” of calling my name a pseudonym. Obviously he hadn’t checked. This gave me the chance to respond with extreme snark on a slow-news Friday:

Stilgherrian writes: “Who is this ‘Stilgherrian’?” asks Telstra flack Rod Bruem (yesterday, comments). Too funny, Rod! I don’t know about you guys over at Telstra, but here at Crikey we’ve got the internet. There’s this “Google” thing which we use to look up stuff. Apparently at Telstra you have “Sensis” instead, but even Sensis uses Google now. It takes just seconds to find an entire website about me, including a page called About Stilgherrian.

You can read about me and cows and gin and my geeky computing science background and my broadcasting career. There are photos too, including one of me with a bare-breasted garden gnome, and info about pretty much everything else in my world apart from my secret life as a goat dominatrix. Google says I’m on lots and lots of other websites too. I’ve even got a Facebook page!

The fantastic thing about Google is that even if you misspell my name like you did, Rod — don’t you have copy and paste at Telstra? — the first thing it says is “Did you mean: stilgherrian”. Clever, eh? If you use Sensis, you might not find my website straight away, ‘cos Sensis defaults to Australian pages only and my website is hosted in the US. It’s much cheaper there. Why is that, Rod?

“Why do you let him post reports on Crikey anonymously?” Well, Rod, if you’d done the Google thing, you’d have discovered that “Stilgherrian” is my real, actual legal name — like on my passport and Medicare card and the electoral roll and the endless bills and all those nasty letters I keep getting from the bank. I’m even in the phone book. Is the phone book a Telstra thing, Rod? If Telstra can still afford an intranet, you’ll find that I was a contractor to your marketing department a while back, and I’m currently trialling your rather nifty Next G mobile broadband network.

Look, I know it’s all very unusual, Rod, what with just a given name and no surname n’all, so maybe that’s enough of a challenge for this week? Or was there something you wanted to ask or say about the content of Monday’s article? What was it about again? Oh yeah. Telstra and the internet.

Didn’t you like it, Rod?

Since publishing those personal links, I’ve got some fan mail — some good, some rather disturbing.

I’m now also the number one Google search result for “goat dominatrix”. Make of that what you will.

Rod, to his credit, has since posted a comment, which I’m reproduce in full here:

Dear Mr Stilgherrian, please forgive me for not knowing who you are, not having Googled you and for spelling your name wrong. I hope you can forgive me for thinking Stilgherrian was a pseudonym — people spell my name wrong all the time, so I know how frustrating it is – and my parents gave me three names, not just one!

As a loyal Crikey reader my beef was actually with them for for not having properly introduced you to readers, given you were honoured with the lead story in the newsletter earlier in the week. Now I’ve seen your website and read your qualifications I can better understand where you’re coming from.

Yes I strongly disagree with some of your commentary, I think you misrepresented Sol Trujillo’s recent comments about what Telstra would do when faced with competition from another company building a national broadband network in competition with Telstra. You suggested Telstra was holding back an upgrade to the HFC cable, when in fact Telstra has upgraded the cable to much faster speeds than Optus, its nearest competitor. Is Optus holding Australia back even more?? It would be logical for Telstra to put on hold further upgrades when it had the potential to build the NBN. Now that is out of the question, Telstra of course looks to ‘Plan B’. Isn’t that a logical sequence?

You also suggest Telstra has held Australia back when it comes to faster broadband. I disagree with that view. The rules and policy settings are made by the Government. In most instances Telstra has led the way, in wireless we’re leading the world. But investment in the fixed network is complicated by many factors, especially the fact the rules force Telstra to subsidise competitors.

Telstra, as a private company has to compete and play by the rules. If things aren’t working, if investment isn’t happening, it’s silly to point the finger at the players rather than the referee. Companies make decisions based on how they think they can best make returns in the competitive marketplace. The rules as they stand have discouraged investment by allowing other companies to get a free ride on Telstra’s investments. If you want to attach more sinister overtones to how companies behave, you’re living in a conspiracy dream world, in my view.

Best wishes,
Rod Bruem

There’s also a similar-length comment from Wes:

Wow, I followed this little spat via Crikey, and look how it plays out. Telstra subsidising the competitors. Now I’ve heard everything. How about the taxpayer subsidising Telstra to position them into this strong-arming overlord who keeps Australia in the Dark Ages. And in return, we don’t get cheap, quality privatised service. Just privatised.

Now let me be clear. If I was Telstra, I would do exactly the same. But to send in a terrier spinner to try and make a case that Telstra are the champions of quality infrastructure in Australia is just cynical and no-one buys it. You’d be better off just saying ‘this tactic is in the interests of our shareholders’ and leaving it at that. No-one buys this dribble that Telstra are really the good guys. Not a soul. Not even Grandma, who just keeps ‘Telecom’, despite the kids trying to get her to move, since she’s been a Telecom booster since her nephew, Phil, used to work on the lines.

But you kids play nice, now. Play the ball, not the man. Telstra’s days are numbered anyway. Grandma will die, companies will figure out their blind loyalty makes no sense whatever. More money for less service never wins as a business model in the end. Telstra might get into plasma TVs or this new fangled woireless stuff, but Australia must get off this drip feed, and Telstra has to stop whining. But at least it’s amusing for now.

And for the record, this is the first time I have ever sided with anyone who ever mentioned anything to do with D&D. I am mellowing.

After all that, I’m exhausted! I’ll respond shortly. Meanwhile, do feel free to add your own comments!

I’ve previously called Vodafone “brain-dead” because they don’t redirect the misspelt version of their web address and couldn’t respond intelligently when I told them about it. But now… [sigh]

A fortnight ago there was confusion over Vodafone’s plans for the iPhone. Were data charges included in the cap or not? Vodafone’s “explanation” seemed to contradict their published terms a conditions.

Even though all their previous plans allowed data to be included within the cap, billed at $1 per 5 minutes of connection, Vodafone reckons that for the iPhone it’s billed separately. Can anyone give a rational explanation for why the data should be more expensive if the device happens to be an iPhone?

Other than price-gouging, that is.

After all, if your mobile device is a laptop they’ll sell you 5GB/month for $39! Given that Telstra and Optus had already announced their pricing, Vodafone could have scooped them both with a better package, rather than looking like a greedy also-ran.

So with this background, I was… erm… thrilled to receive my phone bill this month.

Here’s a picture.

Yes, instead of the usual $79, a busy month saw me go over cap. I’m up for $476.91.

I reckon Vodafone should have given me a warning.

I do realise that I signed up for the deal and I’m supposed to know what I’m spending. I do realise that telcos make Big Fat Profits from mistakes like mine. It’s in their short-term interest not to warn me. But I reckon it’s customer service FAIL. Particularly as I’m not on a contract and I can switch carriers tomorrow.

Vodafone could have made this a customer service win. Noting that my data usage was climbing, noting that I’m a business customer who’s not on contract, they could have called. “Hi, you’re going over cap. Would you like to upgrade now? It’ll save you money, and if you sign a contract we’ll throw in a new phone.”

As it stands, though, I’m unhappy. I used what felt like “a bit more than usual” but have a bill six times more.

I’ll be calling Vodafone tomorrow. Let’s see if they can make me happy again.

Mark reckons all three carriers offering iPhone have completely failed to recognise the pent-up demand for the device, and the way it will change network usage.

A typical example is Optus’ plan (general consensus holds that Optus has the most generous plans of the three carriers), which provides a maximum of 1GB of internet usage per month — for a hefty $179.

Let’s run some numbers here. The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald clocks in at just about a half a megabyte. That’s fat, but also fairly typical. The widespread deployment of broadband has lead to a proliferation of media-rich pages. Now, if I hit the SMH page (or a similar site) sixty times a day, I’d reach my 1GB cap. Add in any Google Maps activity, or push email, or what have you, and the figure could easily double. Now, instead of $179/month, I’d have that bill plus potentially hundreds of dollars in data charges.

On the other hand, if I wanted to buy 3G mobile data service for my MacBook Pro from Optus, they’d give me a cute little USB dongle with the Hauwei 3G/HSDPA modem and SIM card, plus 5GB of data — and it would cost me only $39.99 a month.

Have I missed something here? After all, data is data. The network usage for the dongle is completely indistinguishable, as far as the network is concerned, from the iPhone 3G.

Mark’s conclusion is that there’s an “iPhone tax”.

Not only are we asked to pay a premium to purchase iPhone 3G, we will also be paying a premium to receive every bit of data on iPhone 3G.

The solution, he says, is to start our own MVNO, or Mobile Virtual Network Operator.

It’s not as hard as you might think,…

If we put the word out through our various social networks (both human and electronic), I’m sure that in practically no time at all we’d have 10,000 or more subscribers ready to sign up for an MVNO. I don’t know how many subscribers we’d need to get to a break-even point, but I doubt it can be many more than that. Given the amazing facility of many members of the community for setting up and running online services that scale to handle many users, I suspect that much of the infrastructure for this MVNO can be created by the community, for the community, at very low cost. The power of social networks — as has been endlessly pointed out by Clay Shirky — is that it allows large numbers of individuals to self-organize quickly and effectively.

I’ve heard people complain about the mobile carriers since before I moved to Australia. I suggest that it’s time to put up or shut up. Passive resistance is no longer enough. It is time to show the carriers that we can do this ourselves. We can service ourselves and our needs. We will do this because doing anything else is abhorrent.

We could name our MVNO the Future AUstralian Carrier, or FAUC.

Don’t like your plan from Telstra, or Vodafone, or Optus? Well, get FAUC.

As I write this, the Facebook group FAUC (Future AUstrailian Carrier) Interest Group [sic] already has 127 members…