Random thoughts and observations
I received a bill from Telstra today for $19.80. I don’t have an account with Telstra!
I immediately called to query the account. The helpful operator was not surprised and said she could guess why I was calling.
She asked me if I knew what 1900 information numbers were. I played dumb and she said they were numbers that people call to get the weather, horoscopes or other information.
Telstra cops a lot of criticism, much of it justified. However, when it comes to public payphones, a reality check is appropriate. Rewind a few years to the former Telecom and the Postmaster General, there were payphones dotted at regular intervals. Mobile phones and the internet didn’t exist, milk was delivered by horse-driven carriages and television was black and white. Fast forward to the modern era and nearly everyone has a mobile phone.
I’ve been in Adelaide for three weeks now and I still don’t have a proper phone connection. The story is like something you’d expect to hear from a third world country. To begin with, I rang the phone company (known here as PC), gave them my new address and asked for a connection. Easy. It [...]
Some simple research has proved what many people have known for a long time — Australians are being ripped off by telcos when it comes to the cost of text messaging. The standard flat rate for a text message at Telstra and Optus has remained unchanged at 25 cents, while at Vodafone, a text is [...]
I filed a story today about Optus expecting a record number of text messages to be sent in Australia on New Year’s Eve. I thought it was one of those quirky yarns that people would be interested to read. Optus expects customers to send a record 57 million text messages and make 67 million mobile [...]
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