Posts by atsak

A sysadmin in telco hell

Welcome to my hell

This is why I'm always trying to drive the costs as close to zero as I can; if I'm going to get jerked around I may as well not pay for it. It does not matter who you use (I work with Rogers, Bell, Allstream, VOIP Innovations, Vitelity, voip.ms and Telus to carry our various telecom services) they all make mistakes like this; Rogers did a very similar thing the author describes when porting our numbers from Bell to Primus in a recent drive to save themselves some money, I assume, broke the lines for three days; only a LOT of sleuthing on my part resolved the issue. All supposedly transparent to me, and everyone denying responsibility all the way along.

The number port management in Canada and the US is broken; it's too hard to find out who "owns" the number so you can actually get things fixed.

When one oligopoly screws another

My take from both sides of the fence

I run a company that distributes in Australia, Canada and the UK. I charge more in Australia because while freight from China is cheaper, the port fees in Sydney and Melbourne are astronomical compared to Canada and the people that work there are LAZY. It takes me twice as long to get a shipment off the docks in Australia and into my warehouse in Sydney than it takes me to get it off the boat in Vancouver AND across the rails to my warehouse in Toronto.

Fulfillment costs are at least 40% higher because of high labour costs and land costs in Australia (and I have shopped around extensively).

Petrol is more expensive.

What Australia needs is Wal Mart. I hate Wal Mart, but they get everyone into line on consumer pricing and supply chain as well. Big W just doesn't cut it. Imagine if a case of 24 Pepsi/Coke was $20 like it is in Australia in the US or Canada!

Australia is more expensive because the inputs are more expensive. IT's simple math.