[LINK] The Telstra Kerfuffle - PR and History

[Craig Sanders]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 07:48:44PM +1100, Frank O'Connor wrote:
> # In the early 1990's the real time Internet happened. Other than as
> an opportunity to sell more hideously expensive ISDN lines to amateur
> ISP's, Telstra initially ignored it [...]

they did much more than just ignore the internet. they sabotaged
it because it competed far too well against some of their existing
products.

i worked for an ISP[1] in 1990/91 which made the fatal mistake (which many
other telecommunications companies also made - aka "Suicide By Telecom")
of becoming a Service Provider on Telstra's[2] network....and worse,
remaining with them even after it was patently obvious that T. were not
only failing to live up to their side of the deal, they were actively
sabotaging their "partner".

the ISP was shafted by T. because the internet in general scared
telstra, and specifically because internet email scared the hell out of
Keylink/Telememo, an over-priced Telex-like service which was already
obviously obsolete even then (and clumsy, slow, and stupidly expensive).
the Keylink people within T. had much more power and influce than an
external SP.

(BTW, prior to working for that ISP i worked for T. in the same building
as the keylink team...i ended up working for the ISP after T. decided
to move their Discovery operation to Sydney and relocated the staff or
retrenched those, like me, who didn't want to move to sydney)



[1] this was long before the WWW, before PPP (and even before SLIP), so
an "ISP" back then meant essentially a BBS-like interface to internet
email, usenet news, and ftp.  IIRC, gopher was the hot new protocol at
the time, ftp-by-email was popular, and archie provided a very useful
service for finding publicly available files (to save you manually
wading through the huge - megabytes and megabytes! - quantities of files
available)

[2] "Telecom Australia", as it was known then.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>