Re: First hit is always free-ish.
Yes, the open source products have a standard Windows user interface, MS Office uses their own weird and annoying one.
8 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jan 2013
Due to treasonous conservatives favouring the foreigner Murdoch's pay-tv interests over the Australian population, and general wrecking of anything Labor did, we mostly ended up with "fraudband", aka VDSL aka FTTN, in place of Labor's Fibre to the Premises. In response Telstra sold / provided modems which included a SIM on their 4G network, probably now 5G.
David, the previously government owned, and by far best network, Telstra has cell broadcast. Their underlying technology provides greater range than the GSM used by the other networks, although this may not benefit overseas visitors.
But some areas are very hilly, which makes providing service over wide areas difficult.
The other networks are:
Optus, set up to satisfy a political whim for competition, and now owned by the Singapore dictatorship's investment company. They company also owns the power distribution company which caused the great majority of deaths during Black Saturday by failing to maintain the poles and wires.
Vodafone, currently being sued over extraordinarily poor service, specifically drop-outs and pathetic data rates in a case nicknamed "Vodafail". They basically sold a huge number of services cheap, without the infrastructure,
The problem is that while they share towers at times, they generally act like spoilt 2 year olds, and do not allow roaming between networks.
A lot of rural areas have FM relay of local radio, and there is also digital (DAB+) in the city. There used to be a national network of shortwave transmitters, carrying national and regional programming, but that is now only transmitted in the Northern Territory, carrying NT services (although SW listeners and hams can often listen in in Sydney, etc..