I was encouraged when Telstra was apparently knocked out of the bidding for the broadband network.
It happened in a week when Telstra drove me to break a journalistic rule of mine: never use your position of (very modest) power and influence to achieve some personal agenda.
When I tell you the long, bitter story, I’m sure you will forgive me. And there are some public policy lessons in it all.
Two years ago Telstra put up a NextG tower at the village I go to at the South Coast. Before that, I had Vodafone and had to walk up a hill, face north-north-west, stand on tip-toe and make sure there was no wind before I got coverage.
Telstra had five bars. But I had to buy a Telstra NextG phone. (Sort of reminds you of Microsoft.) Because I was not a Telstra customer, the sales person virtually insisted that it go in a business name rather than my own. (More inconvenience for no reason.)
The phone was the only NextG phone available at the time. It had tiny keys that you had to poke with stick, and though the coast coverage was excellent, the reception at home in Canberra was poor. But I put up with it.
Then the two-year contract ran out, so on November 12, I bought a new phone at the Belconnen Telstra Shop — just renamed a “T-Life” shop for the inconvenience of everyone who wants to find its phone number and cannot remember the ridiculously meaningless new name.
I got the new phone and asked that now I had been a Telstra customer could it now be put in my own name? Yes, but to keep the existing number I would have to transfer the account rather than start again.
I took the phone away. Alas, Messagebank did not work. T-Life assured me it would be transferred within 72 hours. It was not. I rang back and was told to ring 125111. Nightmare. Over the next three weeks, I rang more than half a dozen times and spent more than three hours on the phone listening to “I am, we are Australia” and being shuffled about and assured that it would work within, variously, two, 24, 48 or 72 hours. Each time it failed.
In the meantime, the new phone turned out to have an even more flaky coverage than the old phone.
I live 2.5 kilometres from the flag pole on top of the National Parliament and the company that calls itself “I am, we are Australia” cannot give me coverage. I have not answered the mobile at home once in the month I have had it without it dropping out. Coupled with no Messagebank, friends, relatives and associates might well think I have fled the country.
Each time I phoned 125111 I had to go through a nauseating voice-recognition preamble before I was given the privilege of waiting for a “consultant”. I started to time the calls. One call, during which I was transferred to “connections”, went for 73 minutes, according to the timer on my landline phone. I even used my other landline to dial 125111 again to find out what was going on with the original call.
I had to go out and abandon the call – 73 minutes down the drain.
I rang the shop again. Can you believe it, a customer answered the phone. He told me all the Telstra “consultants” were busy. I told him to get out of there before it was too late.
By now any sane person would have gone to Optus or Vodafone, but I wanted the coast coverage.
On Wednesday, in pure frustration, I rang Telstra’a National Media centre and said I was going to write about the saga of one their enraged customers who had been given a horrible run-around. The customer was me.
Later that afternoon, Messagebank was connected to my phone. You shouldn’t have to do that. The coverage, however, remains awful.
Every Telstra staff member was perfectly polite. Perhaps they become immune to enraged customers. The Telstra media spokesman listened carefully and obviously did his job. (I’d rather be media relations officer to Caligula.)
The essential problem is monopoly. Dissatisfied people should be able to go to other carriers, but, as the Telstra spokesman politely told me, “We built the tower at the coast, so why should we share it with anyone?”
There are many places in Australia where Telstra has mobile towers and does not share them. It also owns the copper-wire telephone network. True, it is required by law to give access to it for telephony and internet, but if it itself is also a retailer of communications competing with others over that same network, it has an impossible conflict of interest. It will favour itself. It will only do the bare minimum the law requires to give “equal” access to other carriers.
In a country like Australia we should have just one mobile network with one set of towers owned by one company (public or private or a mix) to which all communications retailers (none of whom would be the network owner) would have equal access. The same for the copper-wire network. The same for the new internet network.
Previous governments made a hash of selling Telstra. This Government should insist on a separation model for the new internet broadband network and should try to wrest back independent control of the copper-wire network despite the constitutional difficulties.
The main reason Australia is so far behind other developed counties in telecommunications can be put down to poor government policy which has allowed Telstra to abuse its monopoly powers at the expense of consumers. For goodness sake, let’s not fall into the same trap again.