Last week, a family friend rang for some technical help. "Telstra sold me this wireless Internet service and they promised it would work both at my home and at my office," he said. Said home is in the Melbourne CBD, and said office is in Kyneton, a lovely town about an hour away from Melbourne.
The council rubbish truck didn't pick up my bin last week. Instead, the garbage contractor left a big yellow sticker highlighting exactly why my old egg shells, rancid fruit, microwave pizza boxes, an ancient and smelly pair of sneakers, and the odd brick had been left to rot on my property.
As expected, Senator Stephen Conroy -- who made a career out of picking holes in the actions of his predecessor Helen Coonan -- was named to Kevin Rudd's front bench, bearing the interesting new title of Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (BCDE).
One of the real dangers of election season -- for politicians, at least -- is being held to their word.
There's something immensely gratifying about accomplishing the seemingly impossible -- particularly in IT, where pundits regularly proclaim that a particular technology has hit its physical limits.
If there was ever evidence that the stoush over broadband had gotten personal, it came when Telstra's sour-grapes mentality led it to sue Helen Coonan, personally, for claimed procedural flaws in the OPEL contract.
Australian telecoms is increasingly resembling the US during Prohibition, with Telstra as Al Capone and the ACCC as Eliot Ness.
If there ever were concrete evidence that Labor is blowing smoke up the proverbials of the Australian population, it came earlier this month as Senator Stephen Conroy, the man charged with promoting Labor's fibre-everywhere policy while simultaneously taking potshots at his counterpart Senator Helen Coonan, put his foot squarely in his mouth.
Bill Murray's weeks spent in the purgatory of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania -- depicted in the amusing movie Groundhog Day -- have become a cultural sounding point, mentioned in passing to describe a situation where someone is stuck in the same painful, unresolvable situation day after day.
It must be nice to view the world through rose-coloured glasses as Communications Minister Helen Coonan seems to.
In telecoms, Telstra is no 800 pound gorilla. It's an 800 pound colic-ridden infant, irritably throwing its toys out of the pram when it doesn't get its own way.
There must be something in the water in Canberra. After years of measured inaction, the Coalition is taking long-overdue steps towards universal broadband and working around Telstra's continued domination -- after 10 years of deregulation -- of the country's telecommunications wholesale markets.
In the broadband war, it seems, everyone has an opinion and those with a vested interest are playing fast and loose with the truth.
Just a few days after the Australia Connected program was launched Communications Minister Helen Coonan was selling the initiative to the TV talk shows.
The government's Australia Connected program, it appears, is no longer an altruistic and long-overdue investment in Australia's infrastructure, but a political football whose primary purpose seems to be to send a massive "nyah-nyah" to the Labor party.
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