It’s all about infrastructure

COMMENTARY: Here at Rabid Reseller we were mighty upset to hear that Telstra won’t let other ISPs access its planned new fibre optic network.

Why does that bother Rabid? Because it’s un-Australian not to share your toys. The sooner the government sells Telstra to a multi-national investor the better as far as we’re concerned. Then nobody will mind what Telstra does, as we’re all used to being screwed by multi-nationals. That’s why they exist – somebody’s gotta be responsible for global inequality.

But if we were a rival telco getting the door slammed in our face by Telstra we wouldn’t bother bleating about it, we’d just build our own fibre optic network. How hard can it be anyway?

Acme Hire has reasonable rates on large yellow tonka toys just perfect for trench digging and Rabid has just cleaned out the garage and found a stack of those fibre optic lamps from our disco days.

We’ll let them go cheap to the first ISP that makes a reasonable offer. Found some jousting sticks too, if anyone’s interested.

What seems to get Telstra really irked is that although they own the copper wires that feed the bytes to every home, the government has ordered the telco to let everyone else send their data down Telstra’s cables.

Now that would annoy anyone. How are they going to tell which bytes belong to which telco? Apart from that mystery, Rabid has worked out that we-the-people actually paid for Telstra’s shiny copper cables before the government sucked everyone’s superannuation funds dry to privatise it, so why aren’t we-the-people billing Telstra for access?

Rabid Reseller plans to invoice Telstra today for its blatant trespass on our copper wires without due compensation. But what to charge? We’re not sure how much copper got laid over the years but we reckon we must at least own the last-mile or maybe the local-loop, since that’s what all the other telcos keep harping about.

Now this raises yet another telco mystery or two. Rabid vaguely remembers that we went metric back in the sixties, when suddenly one ounce was 28 grams, so why do telcos still talk about last miles?

The other mystery is the local-loop. What on earth is the point of a telephone cable that only goes around in a loop, local or otherwise?

This conjures up images of an elephant with its trunk shoved up its arse. Or perhaps we’re getting confused with closed loops, or just the definition of snookered, which would seem appropriate, since we were never very good at that either.

Anyway, Rabid doesn’t need to pick up the phone to talk to ourselves, well not yet, so the local-loop remains a complete mystery.

Besides, all this talk about cables is so twentieth century. Everybody knows the future is wireless, even Telstra admits that much.

To prove the point Telstra has decided to shutdown the wireless networks that the cow cockies use, so they can replace it with a bigger fatter network that lets them send each other pictures of naked cows. Until now the farmers have had to make do with just listening to their moos, leaving the rest to their imagination.

Life is obviously going to be so much better in rural and regional Australia when the fantastic new 3G service arrives.

Those annoying dropouts and dark spots will be so much easier to tolerate with a multimedia phone. Right now you have to contend with losing the voice-call but with 3G you’ll be able to lose the entire network and crash the tractor into the nearest dam.

Thanks to the drought it won’t be full of water, so no need to blow the budget on the outdoorsy woodsy military specification mobile phone.

If you think the idea of selling 3G phones to farmers has Rabid excited you’re damn right. Rabid Rural is waiting for your call right now with some terrific upgrade offers on those old CDMA clunkers. Can you say that again please, you’re dropping out? Try moving away from the trees.

What’s that? You clear-felled them already? Well, try moving away from the tractor. Careful, not too close to the dam! Gotta go, SES waiting!