In Answer to Your Question
A wireless telecommunications base unit. It provided two phone lines and a broadband connection. But I couldn’t say, because TelstraClear made us sign a 12-month NDA. I hope it was 12 months, anyway. If I suddenly stop posting in the near future, you’ll know why. Anyway, there you go. Although I did enjoy your idea of a wireless dial-up router or whatever it was.
We were part of an early one-month trial. Considering that, the service was pretty good. Occasionally the connection dropped and we had to do some convoluted equivalent of pressing the reboot button. The voice quality was by my standards unacceptable, and this is why I hate you when you ring my cellphone. Having said that, getting two phone lines and a broadband link for free was the shit.
It was also a very elegant setup. No phone line needed to our house and no phone lines needed within our house. (We were also provided with a multi-phone cordless base/answerphone.) Telephone and internet connection to the outside world was effectively plug-and-play. Powerful, simple and elegant. There is an important distinction to be made between technology becoming genuinely “better” rather than simply “more advanced.” As long as they get the quality and reliability sorted out, this would have been very much in the category of real improvement.
Anyway, at the end of the month we packed it all up and gave it back. (The comms unit, anyway. We got to keep the phones.) I think TelstraClear have since decided not to go through with a full deployment, for whatever reason. The tyranny of Telecom continues…
Interesting. I imagine it would be similar to what Woosh is proposing to offer. Though woosh will be charging a fairly large amount (for what is achievable through skype for free (in my understanding)). TelstraClear always seemed like good competition for telecom to me. It’s a shame their scaling back. Damn monopolies.
Btw, how do National and Labour compare in issues of regulation and competition? I would imagine National would be inclined to remove regulations, but I can also imagine them being impressed by arguments for monopolistic competition.
Comment by Pete — October 3, 2005 @ 10:14 am
Huh, it’s obviously been a while since I was at uni. Completely wrong term (monopolistic). Is this referred to as “monopoly competition”, or something else? Also, did I loan you my IB textbook? If so, do you still have it?
Comment by Pete — October 3, 2005 @ 10:22 am
I’m actually not sure what you’re talking about, but that term always confused the hell out of me. The good news is I found this:
In monopolistic competition, there are many firms vying for control of one market. Each firm offers a different type of product, as opposed to perfect competition in which all offer the same product. Each firm, then, has a monopoly in the market of their own product.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C004323/low/micro2.html#topic4
The bad news is my eyes are bleeding. Yes, I’m pretty sure I still have your textbook. I only use it very rarely, so I can give it back next time I see you if you like.
I think both parties were pretty shit about it. I remember Webfroot had a bit of commentary on it. The key thing we wanted was local loop unbundling, which meant other companies could rent out Telecom’s local line networks or something. Thus we wouldn’t have suffer Telecom’s price gouging for monthly fees, Jetstream etc. Anyway, the govt didn’t do it, although there was a funny angry response from the minister who tried to act like who knew what he was talking about by saying “native HTML” or something. We sniggered in our all-knowing geeky way.
Comment by db — October 3, 2005 @ 3:28 pm
Interesting, so monopolistic competition was the right term. I saw a similar definition, but saw “many firms” and figured I was wrong. You don’t have any more IB papers do you? If you do, feel free to keep it, otherwise I need to try and boost my side of the textbook shelf in our new bookcase (Megan is kicking my ass).
Comment by Pete — October 4, 2005 @ 11:48 am
I think monopolistic competition is comparable to daries – they offer the same things but in different areas, and they are small ‘monopolies’ in their respective areas.
I actually would join anything that helps defeat Telecom. But guess not. Did you have to apply for that trial?
Comment by JL — October 4, 2005 @ 11:36 pm
Pete: I am doing IB310 only this semester, so by the next time I see you I will probably have pretty much finished. Dunc has some really boring books (XML, etc) that you should get off him.
JL: Interesting analogy. Anyway, yeah they just randomly rang us up and said, “Do you want free shit? We’ll give you free shit. Heaps of free shit! But you have to promise not to tell anyone. Can you do that?” and we were like, “Yeah, sure, whatever. Give us the free shit.” Good times.
Comment by db — October 4, 2005 @ 11:55 pm