Well Henk, welcome to the world of community activism - you may think you're a simple Cyber Cafe owner, but as soon as you launched the website you made a very important transition, and one I endorse wholeheartedly.

And certainally you're not alone in terms of your concerns regarding Telstra and overcharging. Ever since telecommunications deregulation we've experienced a litany of ACCC investigations and court challenges to Telstra's incumbency, which saw the emerging telecommunications industry in Austalia attempt to tackle the problem through the courts.

I understand your frustration with the TIO - but in actual fact there's little they can do about it. The Problem was created when the previous government decided to privatise Telstra without dealing with its incumbency. What they should have done was separate Telstra Wholsale - which owns the all important copper infrastructure which we and our parents and their parents and so on - all built with our taxes - from Telstra Retail, and sold the two as separate entities (or not, depending on where you sit on the whole privatisation debate).

The argument was of course that there was little value in selling Telstra retail, and a lot of complexity involved in separating the the company into the different entities. So the government took an easy and short term option and sold it as a whole, then attempted to regulate it so that it wouldn't sell itself wholesale broadband at a price that enabled Testra Retail to undercut its competitors.

As a result - millions has been spent in the courts as competitors to Telstra Retail (mostly from other ISPs) attempt to force it to stop undercutting its rivals by selling itself connectivity at uncompeitive rates. I don't know how many times Telstra has come to market with boradband rates which undercut its rivals simply because it could - and let's face it, if you had control of a comodity, and a stake in the retail sector, surely you'd sell yourself that comodity at lower rates than the rest of the market so as to be able to undercut you competitors - what they are doing makes sense on a micro-economic level, but is unhelpful on a macroeconomic level.

What we do now is a difficult issue - as you point out individuals and companies who attempt to deal with Telstra's over pricing through the courts - or through the TIO - are just as likely to end up frustrated and out of pocket.

Now that Testra has been completely privatised the only way out is for the government to force its wholesale and retail arms to separate through regulation (in the same way the Baby Bells were created by the forced break up of At&T in the US in around 1984).

Born from frustration your attempts to highlight the problems are entirely logical, and might perhaps combine with similar moves by others to highlight the problems with the current structure of the telecommunications market in Australia, and perhaps move government policy in a different direction. You have allies in the form of industry commentators like Paul Budde - from amongst Telstra's rivals, - from user groups and websites like Whirlpool, and of course are always welcome to invite ideas and opinions here at Open Forum - we'll look into following up some of your concerns from amongst industry players.

And I think it's important to point out that in raising such concerns - you're not engaging in Telstra bashing (I say so because you will be accused of it at some stage) - you're exercising you democratic right to express concern, anger or annoyance at the results of structural problems within the telecommunication market here in Australia.

Thanks for highlighting these issues on Open Forum.