A view from the trenches of Australian telecommunications. As the name implies, it’s a two-way conversation and we ask you not to pull any punches ... we won’t.
A bulletin board troll in the 1980s, David Braue has been online long enough to remember using the text-based Lynx browser to visit www.ibm.com, one of around 100 Web sites available back then. Telecoms has remained an obsession as he developed ever more complicated schemes to stay in touch with family overseas without going broke. After more than a decade covering Australia's ICT industry - and watching our telcos stumble time and again - he's eager to call them to task.
Opportunities to quiz an executive from search giant Google in person come few and far between. That's why when I attended the launch of Google's new Australian office last week there was only one question on my mind.
I spent enough time at CeBIT last week to know the telecommunications industry was well represented ... but not always without controversy.
Two more great Aussie telecomms blogs to add to my growing list. The first is a blog I'd heard existed but only found today.
As they often do, a press release from Telstra crossed my desk last week. The headline screamed: "Launches nationwide 8Mbps business broadband".
Wednesday seemed like a nice normal day at ZDNet HQ, until all of a sudden in the middle of the afternoon a hush ran through the office. I looked over to the aisle where the consumer technology journalists live, to see my colleague Randolph Ramsay deep in a phone conversation.
It looks like the nation's domain name regulator is trying to raise its profile in the community.
This morning's announcement of a hookup between Internet search supremo Google and wireless carrier Unwired reminded me of an early scene from the 1946 classic The Big Sleep. "You're not very tall are you?
Most Australians have never heard the name "Tellabs", a company that has only seven employees Down Under. Yet internationally, Tellabs is one of the world's largest vendors of networking equipment.
If there's one indication that customer relationship management (CRM) systems at telcos are screwed, it's got to be the phenomenon of the 'zero dollar' bill. This typically occurs when a customer changes suppliers, but the telco's computerised billing system doesn't quite know what to do...
I wouldn't have wanted to be in Telstra spokesperson Rod Bruem's shoes when he walked out of a lift last week to be confronted by The Chaser boys asking if Telstra wanted to purchase naming rights to Cyclone Larry. Bruem told Full Duplex he glibly sent the Chaser crew off to arch-rival Optus: "We've been doing a lot of good work up there but Optus is nowhere to be seen -- maybe you should go speak to them.