yeah... thought about that myself on accasion - its complicated though - Telstra own all the cables and then sell access to other cable companies in competition with them like 'Primus' - (who incidently alerted me on their home page to LW when I signed up with them) - anywayz - the end result is its very difficult to set up a service independent of getting into bed (at a cost of course) with Telstra

Telstra is 51 percent owned by the govt - the argument being that without public ownership the company wouldn't service folks outside the major cities (remember Australia is roughly the same size as the US but 80 percent of the population is on the eastern coastal strip - like having most americans crammed into the californian coastline)

this argument is powerful - providing satelite connections in the outback is never ever going to be cost effective if you're compelled by law to charge users the same 40 cents per call you charge city users (as you should) - so - on the one hand I support public ownership but on the other hand some genuine competition would mean that they'd have to start offering services people actually want rather than their current policy of begrudgingly offering half arsed services at prohibitive costs that nevertheless generate massive profits for themselves because of their monopoly

Now - just at the moment there's a huge debate happening here about selling off the govts 51 percent of Telstra in the interest of stimulating real competition - if - the sale goes ahead, and if as part of the sale there's a partial break-up of Telstra - then - whoever gets in first in offering competitive broadband connections could make a killing (Australians love their internet and almost universally loath Telstra)

The cable coverage in Australia is very good and there's massive amounts of totally unused bandwidth available so if the Telstra stranglehold is removed it should prove possible for someone to offer connections that would be cheap and so popular - also need to remember Australians just love the underdog so anyone who positioned themselves as taking on Telstra in a sort of David/Goliath struggle would be everyones favourite from day one

ah - sweet dreams - sigh

bad_vlad