I’ve read so much about the Telstra break-up this week, and written and spoken about it so much, that my brain’s still fizzing. But here’s one thing: I predicted this more than a year ago!

On 2 January 2008 I wrote, as part of my Predictions for 2008:

Telstra will be forced to separate its wholesale and retail businesses. Meanwhile the Sol Trujillo-led management team will continue to play nasty with the government, causing them to be increasingly sidelined — especially over the Rudd government’s new broadband rollout.

OK, I got the timing wrong. But it does seem that I was reading the signs correctly.

Looking back at those predictions, I’m saddened to see that former defence minister Brendan Nelson hasn’t been investigated for his role in that deal to buy $6 billion worth of Super Hornet fighter aircraft — even if someone has since pointed me to their potential use in an electronic warfare role — but has instead been made ambassador to the EC, NATO, Belgium and Luxembourg, and special representative to the World Health Organisation.

Not quite the outcome I was after, unless some Eurospook’s going to give the good Dr Nelson a thorough probing in Brussels.

If that happens, I don’t want pictures.

So, I’m updating my 2008 predictions score to 56.25%, which is now a pass instead of a fail. That’s fair, right?

[Photo: Former Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo, courtesy Wikipedia. I'm so thoroughly confused by the implications of the licensing on that image and a recent Creative Commons report on how people define "non-commercial" that I'll just say this post is licensed by whatever Creative Commons license it needs to be to shut everyone up. FFS write in Plain English, people!]

Bonus links: This week’s writing about Telstra

• Telstra has to morph into a different kind of beast
• Great for competition? Or one true NBN?
• Crikey Clarifier: What caused Sydney CBD’s Telstra outage?

• Steak House or Gay Bar?: Can you pick the steakhouses from the gay bars, just by their names? It’s harder than you might thing!
• Greenpeace frees ocean life from Pacific longliner | Greenpeace Australia Pacific: Greenpeace’s report on their ship Esperanza “freeing tuna, sharks, marlin and an endangered sea turtle from a Taiwanese longliner”, the Ho Tsai Fa 18. Or, as I prefer to label it, Greenpeace committing piracy and endangering the lives of mariners going about their business.
• Fish Now, Pay Later | Greenpeace Australia Pacific: Darren Smith told me the article on dolphin-safe tuna wasn’t right, that Greenpeace didn’t support any kind of industrialised fishing. Here’s what Greenpeace is currently doing in the Pacific.
• The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna | Southern Fried Science: By promoting “dolphin-safe tuna” — I prefer to spell it with a hyphen thusly — we’ve ended up with a system that’s unsafe for pretty much everything else.
• Meet my hot new stripper wife / Turns out the mid-life crisis is a cruel global phenomenon. Can it be stopped? | Mark Morford: Mark Morford is rapidly becoming one of my favourite writers. In this piece from February 2008 he explains a man’s mid-life crisis rather too well. And entertainingly. I’ll never be able to listen to Justin Timberlake in the same way again.
• The Lost Seasons | ABC: More details of the Australian Aboriginal six-season cycle, including a nice explanation of the system used by the Sydney basin’s D’harawal people.
• War 2.0: Political Violence & New Media | ANU Department of International Relations: I’ve been invited to attend this 2-day symposium in Canberra on 7-8 October. Now, to figure out who’s paying for it, which will be the key factor in deciding whether I can go.
• Jimmy Carter says that tea baggers hate President Obama because he's black | The Root: The former president points out a truth so self-evident you wonder how it could possibly be controversial. But controversial it is. Has modern journalism become so timid that it can’t handle the truth?
• Understanding the Telstra d-i-v-o-r-c-e | SearchNetworking.com.au: Richard Chirgwin’s backgrounder explains just how difficult it will be to separate Telstra into separate wholesale and retail divisions.
• The next generation bends over | 37signals: The makers of Basecamp, something I use every day, reckon the sale of online accounting software Mint to Intuit, the makers of Quicken and Quickbooks, is “indicative of a VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation”.
• Kid Cannabis | Rolling Stone: “How a chubby pizza-delivery boy from Idaho became a drug kingpin.” It’s just another product distribution business, just illegal.
• Rudd & Conroy Gambling On Mandatory Internet Censorship Working | broowery.com: An odd statistical analysis of the likelihood of stumbling across banned material online.
• ACMA Blacklists Iran Protest Video & Boing Boing: Another example of why the ACMA blacklist process is seemingly out of step with what the community might want. That’s not ACMA’s fault, they’re just implementing a dodgy policy.
• Why Sol Trujillo should be sued for stuffing up Telstra: Kohler | SmartCompany: There’s so many historical analyses of Telstra coming out this week, what with the government announcing its break-up and n’all. This one is marvellous.
• 2009 Menzies Lecture by John Howard (full text) | The Australian: “In the Australian context the adoption of a Charter or Bill of rights would represent the final triumph of elitism in Australian politics,” reckons our former Prime Minister. A fascinating read if only for its disingenuous use of political rhetoric and coded messages rather than rational argument.
• Oil Rocks | BLDGBLOG: Imagine a city of 5000 people built on stilts and causeways some 45km out into a lake. Well, it exists, and it’s called Oil Rocks, in the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan.
• The Mushroom Tunnel of Mittagong | BLDGBLOG: A fascinating look, with photos, of a mushroom farm inside a disused railway tunnel. The tunnel itself is still government property, with the farm existing on a 5-year lease.
• Death by Information Overload | HBR.org: “New research and novel techniques offer a lifeline to you and your organization,” it says.
• The Economics of Sex Work | Core Economics: Good to see an update of knowledge since I did a little research on the sex industry for ABC Radio all those years ago.
• CHART OF THE DAY: Primetime On Facebook Is Monday To Wednesday | Silicon Valley Insider: “Social media marketers, take note. The best days to spam, erm, publish wall posts on Facebook that you want your ‘fans’ to pay attention to are Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.”

Australia’s biggest telco closed down their corporate blog nowwearetalking without warning yesterday — and deleted all the content. While I can understand they want to put the often-controversial forum behind them, I think the move was a mistake.

I’ve already written about this for Crikey, Telstra consigns nowwearetalking to the memory hole. It seems odd to kill NWAT just as it was changing for the better – even more so given there’s no replacement. There’s comments from Stephen Collins and Fake Stephen Conroy, as well as Telstra’s official spokesperson Craig Middleton. It’s free to read. Off you go.

But I’d also like to publish the full interviews I did for that story. So here they are.

Stephen Collins

First, here’s my email interview with Stephen Collins of acidlabs, aka @trib.

What do you think of Telstra’s sudden closure of NWAT?

Obviously, it’s up to them, they own and ran NWAT. But I think the approach taken is incredibly disappointing. It shows that while they have taken some steps in engaging with their community they still don’t get what community is. What they’ve effectively done is bulldoze a four year old village before building a new one. It smacks of paternalism (though I don’t think that’s quite the right word).

What’s wrong with closing it down the way they did, removing content?

By simply closing NWAT, Telstra shows incredible contempt for the people who gave over their time to contribute to the site over the past four years. They fail to realise that by creating a community at NWAT (whatever its shortcomings over the years), they ceded some ownership of that community to its participants. Just shutting NWAT down demonstrates pretty clearly that NWAT as a community and community as a practice at Telstra are actually pretty low on the list of priorities. I find it quite surprising as I know several of the people involved in NWAT and have met and spoken to their senior management. The things they’ve told me in the past don’t point to this type of action. Perhaps the new CEO is ensuring he marks his territory the way he wants it?

Here’s the thing, though. By destroying NWAT and not having something to replace it, and ideally to improve upon it, Telstra leaves a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. So, where will we go to talk about Telstra issues and their community? It’ll be Whirlpool, or somewhere else where Telstra will either simply ignore the issues or have to build significant social capital in order to be engaged with. Just shutting NWAT down is a remarkably short-sighted corporate play.

Of course, despite tanking share prices, Telstra and its management have a swimming pool of money to frolic in, so they can afford to not care about community. As the major telco, they still have the lion’s share of the market and likely will for a long time. They could as easily ignore community as pay the apparent lip service to it that they have. I really hope this backfires on them to show the power of community, but at the moment, they’re probably just too big to care — we’re the gnat trying to annoy the elephant. I hope we’re a big enough gnat.

Any comment on their explanation given at nowwearetalking or with their new temporary blog at telstrablogfeedback.com.au?

It is and looks like a half-baked interim measure. As I’ve said, it’s incredibly short-sighted. It’s great that they’re coming out with something new, but to kill NWAT before the new site was ready is plain dumb and disrespects the community they’ve built. Any failings NWAT had were at least in part offset by the fact that Telstra were engaging with people in some way.

I have to suspect that the death of NWAT is a part of some internal Telstra turf-marking war in the wake of the last of the Trujillo management.

How would you have handled it?

I wouldn’t have done what Telstra has, that’s for sure. I have more respect for my community and the people I talk to than they do, apparently.

I’d have announced the new site, probably on NWAT itself, but I’d have kept NWAT going. The content there has so much value — it represents four years of sometimes useful engagement between a huge corporate and its community. Just imagine what would happen if all the online engagement activities Dell or Microsoft do were just switched off? There’d be uproar. Telstra deserves the same.

Even if Telstra slowly wound NWAT down, reducing activity as they moved to the new site, that would have been so much better.

And they should never, ever have just removed NWAT. By building community there, it no longer belonged just to them. It’s incredibly disrespectful.

Craig Middleton

Craig Middleton is Telstra’s official media spokesperson, on Twitter as @VoxofTLS.

While I understand you might want a change of style or direction, why remove all the content that’s been built up? Doesn’t that lack transparency, and show a lack of respect for the value of people’s contributions?

The conversation moves on. Social media is very much about the now and the future. My understanding is that the National Library in Canberra has archived the site, so that is good from an historical perspective, but it’s a bit like keeping old newspapers and I say that with due respect to the contributions and effort people put into their NWAT contributions.

Why do it suddenly and without any warning, especially when there’s no replacement ready for “months”?

The delay in bringing out NWATs’ replacement is so that we can hear from our customers, stakeholders and social media followers what will be important for them in the next iteration of our social media strategy. Think of it like a big focus group.

Why didn’t you just have kept using the NWAT platform, albeit with less-frequent posts, until the replacement was ready?

It’s a different world for us now. NWAT was part of a different conversation and different approach. It was ground breaking and a milestone in corporate social media engagement, but we now have new management focus for Telstra and all of our communications channels need to reflect this new approach.

There’s speculation that this is part of an attempt to make Telstra look less aggressive, removing the last remnants of the Sol era. As Tim Burrows put it, “[NWAT was so associated wit Phil Burgess and the Sol era that it couldn’t get rid of that stench of propaganda.” Is that a fair summary?

It goes without saying that we want to ensure that our external communications reflect the vision and aims of our management team. David Thodey has made it clear he has a different approach to engaging customers and stakeholders. And there is no argument we intend to remain a leader in corporate engagement through social media.

So there you have it. What do you think?

[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!

The story I wrote for Crikey today has ended up being their lead item, under the completely not provocative at all no Sir headline, Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again. And it’s free to read.

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.

The comments have started to come in, starting off with: “Can you please get someone with a real name to write the technology articles?” Poor thing.

Back in January I made some Predictions for 2008. Since 2008 has already ended, let’s see how I went.

I made eight predictions…

1. The Joy of Chairman Rudd’s Iced VoVo Revolution will be dulled by the end of January when they take some stupid actions which demonstrate that they are, after all, politicians like all others. Actually, this has already happened with the announcement of mandatory Internet filtering by ISPs. I’ll write more about that soon.

ALMOST-RIGHT. I’ll count half a point here. It took longer than January for the post-election glow to fade. I’d put it around March, when disappointment with the spin-doctoring of the Australia 2020 Summit started. However I was right in suggesting that Internet filtering would be a problem and I ended up writing a lot about that.

2. At least one member of the (former) Howard cabinet will be charged with a criminal offence over something they did in office. I’d like it to be Brendan Nelson, because that deal to buy $6 billion worth of Super Hornet fighter aircraft stinks — mostly because the air force doesn’t want them and the process was, erm, rushed to say the least. However I suspect it might be something to do with the AWB scandal.

WRONG. It seems the NSW state government is the one which is imploding.

3. Channel 7 will continue to win the Australian TV ratings. Channel 9 will fail to reinvent itself now that its owned by an investment vehicle and not a media proprietor.

RIGHT. Channel 7′s ratings victory has been decisive, and Channel 9′s program schedule is filling up with cheap game shows.

4. Telstra will be forced to separate its wholesale and retail businesses. Meanwhile the Sol Trujillo-led management team will continue to play nasty with the government, causing them to be increasingly sidelined — especially over the Rudd government’s new broadband rollout.

WRONG. The battle still quietly rages over Telstra’s structural separation, and the organisation is increasingly irrational. I was right about the continuing nasty plays by Telstra, wrong about the separation happening this year — but only because the Rudd government has been appallingly slow to take action about anything.

5. Barack Obama will win the US Presidential election. I know Hillary Clinton is currently the favourite, but I have the gut feeling that the Oprah factor will be important, and that Hillary’s dirty washing will be aired.

RIGHT. I don’t think it was “the Oprah factor” so much as the desperate need for change in America — what we Australians would call the “It’s Time” factor. I’m still rather astounded I picked it, though.

6. When former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra returns from self-imposed exile on 14 February the new government, which is a coalition led by a Thaksin-supporting party, will somehow drop the corruption charges against him. Another military coup will follow.

WRONG. Thaksin did return to Bangkok and was promptly arrested and released on bail. Then, when he was given his passport back to visit Beijing for the Olympic Games, he did a runner. But he was found guilty of corruption in absentia and has said he will not appeal the two-year prison sentence. He’s currently in Dubai and will announce his plans on 14 December.

7. At least one Australian company will suffer a major leak of its customers’ private data, prompting new laws on dealing with such things (like they already have in California).

WRONG. I still think this is a problem waiting to explode.

8. We’ll finally figure out what the Storm Botnet, the world’s largest network of hacked computers, is for. My guess: whatever the hell the designer’s paying clients want it to be for.

RIGHT. The Storm Botnet was rented out mostly to spammers, and some estimates reckon 20% of the entire global spam output originated there. Researchers hijacked part of the network and reckon spammers could turn a profit with a response rate of less than one in a million.

Final Score: 43.75%. Fail.

I’ll make my predictions for 2009 closer to the New Year.

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…

1. The Joy of Chairman Rudd’s Iced VoVo Revolution will be dulled by the end of January when they take some stupid actions which demonstrate that they are, after all, politicians like all others. Actually, this has already happened with the announcement of mandatory Internet filtering by ISPs. I’ll write more about that soon.
2. At least one member of the (former) Howard cabinet will be charged with a criminal offence over something they did in office. I’d like it to be Brendan Nelson, because that deal to buy $6 billion worth of Super Hornet fighter aircraft stinks — mostly because the air force doesn’t want them and the process was, erm, rushed to say the least. However I suspect it might be something to do with the AWB scandal.
3. Channel 7 will continue to win the Australian TV ratings. Channel 9 will fail to reinvent itself now that its owned by an investment vehicle and not a media proprietor.
4. Telstra will be forced to separate its wholesale and retail businesses. Meanwhile the Sol Trujillo-led management team will continue to play nasty with the government, causing them to be increasingly sidelined — especially over the Rudd government’s new broadband rollout.
5. Barack Obama will win the US Presidential election. I know Hillary Clinton is currently the favourite, but I have the gut feeling that the Oprah factor will be important, and that Hillary’s dirty washing will be aired.
6. When former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra returns from self-imposed exile on 14 February the new government, which is a coalition led by a Thaksin-supporting party, will somehow drop the corruption charges against him. Another military coup will follow.
7. At least one Australian company will suffer a major leak of its customers’ private data, prompting new laws on dealing with such things (like they already have in California).
8. We’ll finally figure out what the Storm Botnet, the world’s largest network of hacked computers, is for. My guess: whatever the hell the designer’s paying clients want it to be for.

You might also like to read the interesting predictions from The Australian (not really predictions, but obvious events following on from their news calendar), advertising agency JWT, Peter Black and Rachel Polanskis, and predictions about toy names for 2008.

What are your predictions for 2008? And how do you think mine rate?