re: Forget Telstra go to Optus

I'm a 48 year old guy and Benjamin, i've been around electronics all my life. When i was born my parents had a decadic black phone in the kitchen and a phone in the bedroom which was just unheard of unless you were wealthy enough to afford that which my folks were. The company was called The Post Master General (PMG) and handled as the name suggests, mail and the telephony of Australia at the time. My phone number was BJ 6580 and quite often i remembered my mother asking to place a local or trunk call (long distance) and the operator would often interrupt the call asking "are you extending the call" as phone calls were very expensive because they were timed, like the UK still is today. In 1991, the first company to offer any competiton to Telecom Australia was Optus. They offered the ability to use their service by dialing(a word i hate as it sounds so old fashioned) the number 1 before the number you were calling. Of course there were two things that Optus didn't make obvious. Firstly they are 80% owned by a Singapore company but, more importantly they were using Telstra's facilities and their infrastructure, so the amount of money you saved was really minimal if anything. Fast forward to 2010. The amount of companies that have tried to enter this market isn't just boring, it's pathetic. If you want to offer competition, you have to mirror image the original companies infrastructure. With a population of 22 million people in Australia, the ability to do this is just about impossible. This is why Telstra has the monopoly. Instead of trying other companies myself, i watched from the sidelines as people and friends tried other phone companies and ISPs. Telstra handle all my telephony which is my landline, internet and mobile and i've never been happier. I do object to the Sol Trujillo fiasco and other bad decisions that were made like off shore ISP support but i've never had any major drama myself and while their prices are probably higher than other competition, it's just not worth the hassle to to sign a lengthy contract going on the info i've gathered over the years up until this point in time. If you pay your accounts on time and you're not a pain in the arse on the phone like some people are, Telstra's service is excellent. I do find the recent complaint about a customer being asked to pay $0.00 by Telstra hysterical and i wish all my bills were like that but Optus and other carriers have done a lot worse to their "so called" valuable customers by not supplying what they offered. My cable internet account is about $20.00 a week, my landline has 60 free local calls per month and if you use your mobile sensibly and not yak on it for hours at a time, you'll be fine. The amount of friends who have blown thousands trying other companies is just obscene and the people who are paying out their Optus accounts to go back to Telstra is over the top. Benjamin. If you're gonna say what you said, make sure you can back it up with cold hard facts not a knee jerk reaction you probably caused with Telstra in the first place. I'm actually curious about your age and what qualifications you have in this business to make such a short terse statement. Cheers Gang, Andy :)