TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

Now we are talking (trash) today decided that they would change over the poll that reflected badly against them, which they normally would run for 2 weeks, and instead, chop it short after just 1 week.

The poll results confirmed to a better angle the previous polls results, which Telstra claim were rigged, don’t seem to have been rigged in a manner that skewed the over all results, considering near 80% of voters on this poll all agreed:

“Telstra is holding back high speed broadband services for Australia”.

That fact is true. They have ADSL2+ ready to roll, they even advertised this in the papers, so much so that everyone believed it, and voted as so.
Telstra are holding back high speed broadband services for Australia.

Another funny, but embarrassing point for Telstra’s army of coding idiots and misleading website editors is that the dates placed on the poll for the finish of the last poll, and the start of the poll that just finished, overlap.

The 17th of May came after the 16th of May, so how can the 16th of May see a poll start, and the 17th of May see a poll end, when they only ever offer one poll to users? Seems like they need to learn how to read a calendar, on top of checking user data for any inconsistencies (or incompetencies, however you wish to label them).

The new poll asks the question:
Do you support equal pricing for telecommunications services to people in the city and in the bush?

The answers I expect to see are a bit mid range.
Here’s why:

I support pricing averaging between Metro and Regional where, the pricing is at the cost of providing those extra services.
That provides the case of providing services nationally, at a comparable price.

On the other hand, I don’t think Metro people should be paying more for a service than they have to, after all, they did work hard for the cash they earnt, and as a result, shouldn’t be penalised for it.

So the middle ground turns out something like the TPG pricing we found a while back, where all Metro customers could get a cheap plan, but Regional users would have to pay more for the same (only $10 or so more).

We end up with a better middle ground that way. So, no one is paying for someone elses services by any extreme level.

The government and the customer could both subsidise the cost of the service.

Or, we can go band pricing, the closer you live to the city, the cheaper your service gets. That sort of sucks for areas in regional with high broadband uptake.

So, perhaps they can do numbers based pricing, if its less than 1000, this price, 10000 and under, this price, and anything over, this price..

That should reflect the costs of providing services, and encourage uptake in services to drive the price lower, and leave no one unfairly disadvantaged, with the government contributing to the high cost areas in a customer and government subsidised manner.

The issue isn’t that hard to decide on, I’m sure people in areas with low uptake can accept the fact they don’t have a lot of demand, and therefore, need to pay a little more, and people in Metro, they have neighbours right up their asses, and have to suffer from that enough, so a break on their porn pricing is certainly in order.

I’m not saying prices should be different entirely, but they shouldn’t be wildly off the mark either. They should definitely represent the cost of providing the service to the consumer and a profit for the provider.

So, the poll question is sort of mixed ground. Yes, it’s great to have pricing the same across the board, but on the other hand, it’s a Telstra poll, that generally means pricing the same across the board, and around a double or more increase for Metro to help fund the regional losses (and the profit on top of that as well, for a service that costs not so much more to provide).

Will be watching how it turns out.