Telstra Tries Again

Despite a previous announcement by the government, Telstra is once again attempting to railroad the Telecommunications Bills Inquiry being conducted by the Senate Environment, Recreation, Communications and the Arts Legislation Committee into agreeing to timed local data calls.

EFA calls on all Internet users to protest this issue URGENTLY by writing to the Communications Minister, Senator Alston.

The following commentary is courtesy of Tom Koltai:

In the Sydney Morning Herald this morning, Saturday, February 8, 1997 Section One, Page 9; Anne Davies writes:

Headline: TELSTRA USES NET FOR TIMED CALL PUSH

"Telstra wants to to charge residential customers for timed local calls when they link upto the Internet - warning it faces massive congestion on the network if it is not allowed to introduce the charges."

"Telstra executives yesterday told a Senate committee investigating the new telecommunications legislation that unless the Government watered down down its guarantee of untimed calls to residential customers, the rapid growth in Internet traffic had the the potential to overload the phone system." ......

"Telstra's director of regulatory affairs, Mr. Dennis Hambleton, told the committee that unless Telstra had the ability to charge timed rates for all data calls - not just those used by business - it would face growing congestion at local exchanges at peak times when people used the Internet."

"But a telecommunications expert, Mr. Stewart Fist claimed that this was a specific attack to try and destroy the independent service provider industry and shift it back into Telstra."

With less than 40,000 modems at ISP's in Australia, Telstra are obviously exaggerating the network congestion figures.

Recently in the NW of the USA the Telephone networks collapsed from the congestion of one evening when the snow flurries were particularly cold, not from homebound folks ringing the internet, but from starving people ringing Pizza delivery services.

In the recent USA Bandwidth Forum not one RBOC offerred evidence of network congestion from Internet utilisation. And in the USA, 21 million Americans now have Internet accounts.

The recent Option 2 Billing proposal for Telstra connected ISP's is a clear example of Telstra attacking the ISP's in the pocket. in June 1996 the pricing jumped from 0.02 cents per megabyte to 0.195 cents per megabyte. Now on March the first it is moving to 0.29 cents per megabyte. Does anyone notice a striking similarity to digitised compressed voice charges here ? (ie: a duplex voice circuit is around 12K bits).

The sad thing is that the Senators have no option but to believe Telstra's claims due to lack of contrary public comment.

On Friday 7th February, the Senate hearings into deregulation almost passed the following resolutions as part of the Telecomunications Ammendments Bill.

• Timed business data calls to all ISP's.
  i.e.: the business consumer pays for timed data call to the ISP AND!!!! the ISP pays for the incoming call on a timed basis as well.
• A motion to move the dial tone demarcation point back to the exchanges was seen by the majority of senators as too extreme.
• A motion to have co-locate available to each and every ISP/Carrier etc post July 1st, 1997 also failed.

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