The city I live in, Port Macquarie, has awful cell phone reception basically everywhere (I’m on the Vodafone network).
Is this something I can bring up with the local council, or elected representative?
I can’t believe I live in a city of 50,000 people and I’m unable to receive phone calls from my house.
With Australia’s surveillance issues, I would prefer not to have a company which handles our data to have closer ties to the government.
A national provider would allow greater scrutiny by the government.
Can you imagine telstra resisting requests in any way “yeah I’m sure your paperwork is in order, here, have database access”
Provided it’s set up to uphold those values.
I have so little faith in our government to not spy on us.
The way I see it… there’s three different types of spying.
The first is overt legislated spying. Telco’s being required to keep meta data.
The second is covert “black ops” spying. Shady black hole budget three letter organisations exploiting zero-days to access data.
The third is something in between - like the legislation says that law enforcement is authorised to request meta data under certain circumstances, and the telco having an open door policy and not being particularly enthusiastic about protecting user’s privacy.
The first and second types will exist whether or not telco’s are nationalised.
The way to address the third type is transparency and accountability, which is always going to be enhanced by a public institution. What I mean is, if our network was run by a govt organisation you’d at least have some transparency and accountability, where none exists presently.