When the Rudd Labour Government was in election mode they made many promises that the Australian general public loved the sound of. More than a year after being elected the reality has not met the hype, and the major reason has been because many Federal Ministers appointed by Kevin Rudd have not been up to the job they were hired to do. Way too often these ministers are more interested in promoting themselves rather than doing anything to help the Australian public, and to be honest I am fed up with their incompetence, lack of understanding and pandering to special interest groups and major corporations.

For starters when is the government going to stand up to Telstra, a mammoth monopoly run by a team of Americans whose only concern is to line their own pockets while ignoring the needs of the Australian people. The much vaunted $15 billion high speed national broadband network is a perfect example.

Telstra has said entry-level access to its proposed NBN would start at $39.95 per month for a 1 megabit per second connection with 200MB of download capacity. For the average customer wanting true broadband speeds of around 12 megabits per second or better, they are talking charges of $85 a month, and remember this is just to cover 85% of customers not the much vaunted 98% coverage tauted at election time. This means despite the major cost to the Australian public they will provide one of the slowest and most expensive broadband services in the developed world. Over the last 5-10 years Telstra has sacked the majority of their technicians and now relies on outside contractors to develop and manage the majority of their network. The only people helped by this move was Telstra's management who paid themselves huge bonuses of millions of dollars yearly because they lowered the bottom line. Unfortunately that meant contractors were treated like slaves being swamped with way too many repair jobs to be handled properly and had to resort to wrapping lines with shopping bags and elastic bands rather than repairing them, just to meet Telstra's targets. Telstra meanwhile no longer had to pay their workers sick pay, holiday pay and a pile of other expenses that any other worker takes for granted. Well, I say Telstra has been ripping Australians off for long enough and it's time for a change of thinking, especially in these times of worldwide financial turmoil.

If the Australian Labour Party were serious about providing the Australian public with a real solution to its pathetic broadband network they would tell Telstra to go to hell and chose Axia NetMedia a Canadian company to handle the implementation of its proposed national broadband network. Axia is touting a no-frills broadband charge to consumers of $15 a month, compared with the $85 a month being proposedt by Telstra. Axia's proposal will provide a nation wide network that will be twice as cheap and up to five times faster. The proposed Axia pricing makes a mockery of the wholesale price that Telstra charges internet service providers to access its copper network. Axia in comparison, would provide a fibre network to homes and businesses that can deliver broadband speeds that exceed 100Mbps to homes in metropolitan areas. Axia comes to the NBN bidding table as an outsider but one with considerable experience in building next-generation networks and dislodging incumbents. This weekend, Axia will present its case to the Government's eight-person expert panel on its credentials to build the NBN, kicking off a frantic six weeks of discussions ahead of a recommendation to the Government at the end of January.

Axia is no fly by night company. The Axia group's cost modelling is based on what it expects to offer in Singapore, where Axia is in a consortium with Optus's parent, Singapore Telecommunications, to build a $2 billion national fibre network on the island.

"In Singapore, on a fibre-to-the-premise network, we can offer an access price of $15 per resident per month. You could do this with similar pricing in any major metropolitan city, including Sydney," Axia NetMedia chief executive and chairman Art Price told The Australian. Aside from its recent win to build the Singapore NBN, the group has already completed an open-access fibre network to service rural and metropolitan communities in the Canadian province of Alberta.It is now building 12 regional networks in French provinces.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy better start listening to the needs of Australians and stop the backroom deals going on with Telstra to sell the Australian public down the river. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has a record of doing things his way no matter how stupid the ideas may be. Conroy has refused to budge despite numerous attempts to gauge the response rate for the censorship plan that he aims to introduce which includes mandatory internet filtering. The Government plans to make it compulsory for ISPs to block a specific list of illegal web pages but refuse to place any limits on what will be included.  On the surface this may sound like a great idea and the move to censor the internet was one of Labor's pre-election promises, but it has been slammed by several quarters, including the ISP and technical community, political activists and civil libertarians. What Senator Conroy is really wanting to achieve is a system just like what China uses. This means if you speak out against government policies your blocked. This will mean the end of free speech in Australia. By the way, the Australian public will have to pay more for the right to have free speech squashed and lets not forget all this filtering will result in a massive slowdown of Australia's broadband network. So much for getting any benefit from the proposed new broadband network if Senator Conroy gets his way. Unfortunately Conroy can be a real bully boy when it comes to getting his way according to everything I've heard.

When iiNet agreed to trial ISP filtering just to prove what kind of impact it would have on Australian broadband speed and publisize the results, Senator Conroy decided to teach them a lesson. He organized a meeting with all the major film studios and had them start legal proceedings against iiNet for refusing to hand over customer details to them and the police which would be used to sue all of iiNet's customers who downloaded content (movies) on BitTorrent. Telstras customers were not targeted even though many more of them would be downloading content than iiNet's. This was just plain nasty.

Of all the ISP's in Australia iiNet has done more than any to bend over backwards to provide for their customers needs. Unlike Telstra who is only concerned with selling their own copy protected content for a huge profit, charging not just for the content but also they charge exorbinate exxcess charges to download this content. Meanwhile iiNet offers Apple's far superior musical content from their iTunes Store in their freezone as well as offering the ABC's High Definition iView content for free as well. Telstra has declared they will never offer this free content. As far as I am concerned Telstra & Conroy are the worst thing ever to happen to the internet in Australia and to the Australian public. The sooner we get rid of both of them the better.