Regional Australia suffers from Telstra's greed

Well it looks like Telstra is once again trying to muck things up for people in regional Australia. iinet the new leaders in broadband seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place at the moment with Telstra preventing them from offering the same service that city dwellers have to people in regional areas, at the end of the day Telstra cant or should I say wont give iinet a guarantee on how much they will charge iinet to use their infrastructure and have said they want to put the price up around 50%.

”I MUST STATE THAT THE MARK UP ON A SINGLE PHONE CALL HAS SAID TO BE AROUND 20,000% ANYWAY“

The article below has been extracted from iinets web site under the news on the front page.

We all know that telstra has had a monopoly on the market for so many years and now that a great business has been developed and finally offering some great deals the big T has to come along and muck everything up

broadband2 is currently unavailable for sale at exchanges in regional and rural areas.

We have been in discussions with Telstra for some time regarding access to their wholesale ADSL and long distance fibre services to regional locations. At the moment, we're having difficulty locking in realistic pricing from Telstra with any long term certainty. We're guessing this may be due to the upcoming release of Telstra's strategic plan which is due in late November. Until we have confidence on this pricing, we have temporarily suspended new registrations from customers in the affected areas.

iiNet has always been a leader in providing high-speed broadband and competitive telephony services to customers across Australia. For historical reasons, we have a disproportionate number of customers outside the major capital cities. We firmly believe regional and rural customers need access to competitive broadband at a realistic price. This is only possible if we have fair pricing from Telstra, which holds a monopoly on key services required to deliver broadband into rural and regional areas.

As soon as we have reached an agreement, we will advise customers further.

Thank you for your understanding. Please check our website regularly for further updates. IINET NEWS LINK