In Australia we have three physical mobile network operators on a national basis: Telstra, Optus and Vodafone.
All the other brands you see are MVNOs running on mostly Optus and Vodafone, with the occasional one here or there on Telstra.
All the other brands you see are MVNOs running on mostly Optus and Vodafone, with the occasional one here or there on Telstra.
On a tangent related to that, though, I am very confused about exactly how Australia ended up with such a robust, competitive market when it comes to Internet services.
Importantly, Net Neutrality has never ever ever been a thing in Australia: Zero-rating content has been a thing since the 90s: when my friends had a blisteringly-fast-for-the-times 10mbps cable internet package (with, from memory, a 50GB shaped cap), you wouldn't bother downloading something until it hit the BigPond Games site, where the downloads didn't count towards your cap.
Even now net neutrality is not a thing: All of the physical network operators bundle in unrated Netflix or Spotify or, y'know, whatever. They compete on offering the best value-adds, as opposed to competing on crippling the service the least.
I'm thankful for it, but also it strikes me as particularly odd, in the current times where I expect literally every company to be essentially defrauding little old ladies to turn a buck.
Do any fellow Australians have any idea what the real reason for this is? Is it to do with the early legislation demanding Telstra's wholesale & retail structural separation? The mandatory (again, legislated) wholesale of ADSL by Telstra?
Why does Optus (read: Singtel) play ball? Is it because of the aforementioned issues?
I have so many questions.
It took a long time to force this, but aggressive competition by regional ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) forced Telstra to allow access to their ADSL network, and once that was in these and other companies used similar tactics to force open other markets.
Optus aggressively used MVNOs to build market share in mobile markets, and while Telstra still charges a premium the generally decent quality Optus network has kept a cap on how much additional they can charge.
The independent ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) had excellent reputations for customer service until they were all taken over by TPG.
Nowadays Aussie Broadband has a pretty good reputation and interestingly has basically followed the same model: not always the absolute cheapest, but competes on benchmarks like speed, and with an engineering-heavy management team.
The tl;dr summary of it is because it was a defence against Telstra's monopolistic practices.
Zero Rating developed because of a few factors:
Telecom Australia were the only providers of international internet connectivity because they owned all the landing points in the country.
Telecom Australia also owned the first comprehensive nation-wide data/internet transit fiber network around the country and to many cities.
Telecom Australia (which was originally entirely government owned) really didn't give a damn about competing - you either paid their price, or you didn't get connection.
I believe Optus may have had access on one or more submarine cables, but that was primarily for phone service.
Telecom Australia eventually became Telstra. They also built an ISP called Bigpond, which was their home-internet brand.
I believe it was Southern Cross Cables that was the first carrier-neutral submarine cable, and that wasn't online until mid/late 2000 in Sydney.
So, the zero-rating of data started as a way of letting Small ISP's customers download content from international sites, without it costing the ISP a fortune.
I remember pretty much every ISP had their own little quota-free services that they'd host themselves. Game servers were a big one, along with patches, mods, maps, movies, and even some would provide mirrors for the early music streaming services like DI.fm
At the same time as all this was happening, various ISPs were setting up and/or peering with the first IXs and allowing users to access services on the other ISPs for free. At first this was just within your state, but then some ISPs built up interstate capacity and allowed free access to content in other states.
This was coinciding with the rollout of ADSL, again which outside of the capital cities - was largely a Telstra undertaking at first. For Telstra, they already owned all the copper, fibre, and buildings to put it in - so it was a relatively cheap proposition. There was a lot of disputes between Telstra and ACCC over whether Telstra would be required to provide access to their copper network and also the ADSL Network, and under what terms. Eventually other ISPs won the right to install their own ADSL gear in Telstra exchanges (although Telstra screwed with that as much as possible) and so they built out/extended fibre networks to all the phone exchanges for this.
Telstra also made their own online services (Bigpond Movies/Music/Sports/Games/etc) quota free to their own customers. My understanding is that they still didn't do a settlement free peering for access to that data.
Optus effectively followed Telstra's lead in everything with few exceptions.