Telstra

This company is one of the top 5 motherfuckers out there. These guys, on the basis that they OWN the Australian backbone, pitiful as it is, continue to rip and extort poor consumers as is the nature of large evil corporations.

Of course, the fair trading act has now forced them to allow any commercial organisation to make use of the backbone, but this hasn't stopped them from continuing to attempt to extort Australians till we bleed money from our ears.

They charge 25 cents for a local phone call, which isn't too shabby. However their broadband service is insane. Only recently due to the first appearance of competition they abolished their 100 meg per month limit on cable service.

However they still see it fit to cap the download limit to 50 kilobytes per second, the upload at 16, and force us to buy old technology - cable modems that don't work on any other service and are brought over from America because you they're to old to be of use anymore.

In essence, they are the equivalent of AOL, except too damn stupid to follow their tracks

Once upon a time, this company was Telecom Australia - and before that, it was part of the Post Office. Then, in the funky 90s when all things competitive became the flavour of the month, good old Telecom needed to shed its Public Service image for a new, bright future. Hence Telstra, a name that slips off the tongue like a marinated slug, fails to describe anything and exceeds nynex in hopeless telecoms titling.

The problem with the shed public servant image and Telstra is the employees. A public servant is a special breed of person and adapting to private enterprise has been rather difficult for these poor souls.

These people are gradually being weeded out by a process known as "retrenchment" and replaced with individuals better suited to private enterprise. There are still a huge number of bitter employees kicking around, which makes the work environment within the organisation rather unpleasant - hundreds of dissatisfied employees whining over email makes a lot of noise.

Some people have been working for Telstra / Telecom their entire lives, and old habits die hard.

The smarter ones start their own contracting companies and consult to their former employer for enormously inflated prices.

Formerly known as Telecom, Telstra are the largest telecommunications company in Australia. Some people accuse them of being a monopoly, but Telstra arent quite there yet. Aswell as a telephone line, telstra can provide you with cable tv (thanks to a deal they have with foxtel) and high-speed internet.

Telstra are well known for the way they treat their customers. They are forever overcharging them, and in one case, their arrogance was responsible for a death of a young child.

A family from a remote area of North-Eastern Victoria were told by Telstra that their phone could not be repaired because the company could simply not afford to pay the overtime. The family had been pleading for weeks and were always disappointed by Telstra's excuses. However one day, a few hours after another attempt to change the company's mind, the family's 10-year-old son suffered a severe asthma attack. Without a phone, the family were unable to ring for emergency assistance, so the young boy's father ran to the nearest neighbour in a desperate attempt to call for help. During this time the partly blind mother did everything she could to help her son. Yet sadly the boy had died in his mother's arms before his father had returned.

Another Telstra broadband customer was sent a monthy bill for over AU$800,000. Obviously a computer glitch, because that amounts to 7 terabytes of data and would take 3.5 years of heavy downloading to acquire a bill that expensive. And thats assuming the broadband connection maintained a decent speed and the network didn't go down once over this period of time. The bill was also an overdue notice, but the customer had never recieved the original bill beforehand.