So as lock-down in its various forms struggles on, we can clearly see that lives are being saved. But there are still those that think that the economic cost outweighs the benefits. The argument, put forward largely by people who are not intrinsically at risk, is that saving a few lives is not worth the extensive suffering caused by the economy being shut-down.

This all put me in mind of some correspondence I saw recently from the dim dark-ages of the late 1980s. Bear with me here….

In April 1987 the members of the National Committee for Physics were circulated a proposal entitled ‘Volunteers for Ionising Radiation’. In forwarding the proposal for comment the Chair could not resist editorialising by describing it as a ‘somewhat macabre proposal’.

The proposal originated in the UK with Professor Sir Frederick Warner who, in a nutshell, suggested putting together a group of old men who could respond to Chernobyl-like events. The old men would volunteer to “…take 5 rads a day of ionising radiation up to 20-30 days” in responding to a nuclear emergency.

The thing I really like, though, is the diplomatic response from the Australian institute of Physics. Dr JG Collins, writing in response to the proposal, raised four questions. One was just about using technology, the other three are the interesting ones:

1. how great are the differential effects of radiation … on the lives of people under and over 65?
2. how does society value, deferentially, the lives of people under and over 65?
3. who could enunciate such a value judgement?

In other words, are you willing to put a value on old-people’s lives and, if you are, are you willing to stand up and say so publicly? And it’s that that takes us back round to today and the economy-versus-lives question of the covid lock-down.

If you are one of the people pontificating about the damage to the economy not being worth the lives saved are you:

1. clear on how many lives are being saved and lost?
2. willing to put a value on the lives lost in terms of the economy?
3. willing to stand up publicly and tell people that the loss of lives, the loss of their loved ones, is OK because of the economic benefit?

If you aren’t willing to stand up and enunciate such a value judgement, just be quiet.

All that said, interestingly, when the Fukushima disaster occurred 2011 a group of Japanese pensioners volunteered to face the dangers of radiation in place of young people. And maybe that’s what’s needed – if you are some middle aged male talking up the economy over lives, volunteer to go work in an aged-care home or a meat-works and then you might have some credibility.

Geek in Sydney, Who could enunciate such a value judgement?

Is there Covid near you?

The NSW Government has been releasing data showing cases of Covid-19 by suburb. It’s quite interesting, but it just gives totals over time; it doesn’t tell you whether there’s been activity near you recently. My own suburb hasn’t changed the numbers since the data was first released over a month ago because the same four cases are still active, even though they are now old news in terms of being a danger to anyone walking down the street.

So, Actuarial Eye asked me to make a map that shows the recent activity on a map. ‘Sure,’ I said, having vast gobbets of free lock-down time available – ‘that’ll be simple’. It turned out to be less simple than expected thanks to the government API not working as advertised and errors in the underlying dataset (postcodes that don’t exist for example). But thanks to some timely intervention from a friend, we got there in the end.

Covid Near Me shows reported cases from the last 14 days as a default, or seven days if you wish. That gives you some warning if you are in the midst of a hot-bed of Covid activity. Right now there’s only scattered cases and so it’s probably less useful than it would be if we get hit with a full-on second wave in a week or two’s time.

Still, a fun undertaking and quite reassuring personally to know there’re no cases anywhere near me at the moment. So, I’m off to do the grocery shopping now…

Covid Near Me

Geek in Sydney, Covid near me

I hate the logarithmic scale which is being used everywhere now to present the spread of COVID-19 around the world. Bear with me while I explain why, but in a nutshell: we’re sacrificing clarity for ease of presentation and seriously under-playing the severity of the crisis being faced by the world.

So the graph being used almost everywhere to show corona virus around the world uses a logarithmic scale on the y-axis. It results in something like this from covid19data:

The problem is that this completely under-rates the problem for many countries.

The log scale is being used for a couple of reasons. The technical reason, and probably the least understood reason, is that it’s a good way of showing exponential growth. For those who read the axis-labels on graphs it tells an important story. But for most of the rest of us, who just look at the lines, it tells a story that’s pretty misleading.

The second, and I would argue most important reason the log scale is being used, is that it allows us to see countries with vastly different raw numbers on the same graph and get a sense of how they are tracking. On a linear graph, because the numbers from the USA are so disproportionately huge, they squish everyone else into a meaningless mass on the bottom fifth of the page.

So, if we look at the United States and Australia together on a linear graph, Australia is just an undifferentiated straight line at the bottom of the screen – dwarfed by the US numbers. It makes for a useless comparison:

The final reason given when you read interviews with those in charge of making the decision on how to display these numbers is that they don’t want to panic people.

And, you see, that’s why I hate these graphs – because by not panicking people they are completely under-playing the severity of the problem. Let’s use the Financial Times tool again and compare the USA and Spain on the log scale:

Now at a glance, it looks like the USA and Spain are following the same path. And, yes, there is utility in knowing that that path exists and so the USA could learn from Spain’s lessons. And, on its face, it looks like the USA is not doing so badly. It’s clearly flattening the curve and moving to alignment with Spain which is, as we all know, coming out the other side of the worst of the pandemic. Right?

But let’s take a look at the same numbers on a linear graph that just displays the raw numbers.

Now that’s a different story. Spain has literally flattened the curve – the USA continues to reach for the stars. If I was in the USA that graph would positively terrify me. It should positively terrify everyone.

There is a time for not panicking people and a time for open-eyed clarity about what is going on. The middle of a pandemic is exactly when we need people to be appropriately panicked. I recognise, that’s a tricky line when you have armed militias invading parliament buildings; but it’s absolutely necessary when we are making decisions about trading off lives for dollars in relaxing lock-down measures.

Geek in Sydney, Why I hate the log graph, and you should too

The question we should be asking about the COVID-19 tracing app, that the Australian Government is rolling out, is less about privacy and more about efficacy.

From what’s been publicly released, the app uses your device’s built-in Bluetooth. Think about when you connect your phone to your car radio or to a smart watch – your device both broadcasts and receives a Bluetooth code identifying the devices which it then uses to lock in a connection. Now by itself all that’s doing is broadcasting your device’s unique identifier and a human-friendly name and that’s not much use to anyone. What the app does is (a) associate the device details with additional information (your phone number) and (b) keeps a record of the devices it’s come near. That record can then be uploaded to the contact-tracing team and used to find the stranger you stood beside in the Woolworths queue ten days ago.

So the good part about that is that it makes contact-tracing significantly easier – in theory. How else are you going to find the person from the Woolworths queue? Even if I can remember all the possible places I went over the last ten days (and remember part of the point of the app is to relax lockdown) there’s no way to identify everyone else who was there. So that makes sense.

But the other side of things is the number of false positives generated by the incredibly blunt instrument being used. Was the person who’s Bluetooth ID the app harvested actually beside me in the queue, or just over by the bananas; or walking past outside on the street; or sitting in their car at the traffic lights? Once you have the app info you’re going to have to, as the default position, work through all the data it delivers – and that’s going to lead to a a lot of wasted work. And unless almost everyone has the app, the contact tracing team is still going to have to do all the old-fashioned tracing things too. So that’s going to generate a huge, a seriously huge, amount of work.

While doing this without the device may mean some things get missed, it’s not impossible to think that a focus on the more meaningful interactions that a person can remember is more useful than wading through a huge pile of dross. To some significant degree there’s a quality versus quantity question in play.

The very fact that there is no geolocation data included will make working through the list that much harder. Imagine the phone call: Hello, you came in contact with someone with the virus ten days ago but we can’t tell you where that happened because we just don’t know. Were you out shopping ten days ago, did you get take away coffee, did you take your child to school?

On the other hand in the Australian context if we’re really only getting about 50 new cases a day, maybe that’s a manageable amount of data for the contact-tracers to work their way through. That question of efficacy ought to be the starting point.

The question that seems to be dominating everyone’s thoughts, though, is about privacy. The Government assures us this is not a surveillance app. Now in one sense that’s fatuous – of course it’s a surveillance app, but it’s one being used for good. But in another sense they are quite right.

First the nature of the app as described doesn’t store geolocation data, and the data is only available upon request. So that’s not surveillance in the commonly accepted understanding of the term.

But more significantly, you’d have to be blind to not recognise that, if it wanted to, the Government already knows exactly where you are and pretty much exactly what you are doing. They don’t need you to download a new app for that. Your phone is already telling the world where it is – and that data is geolocated. Every time you use your credit card to buy something you make clear where you are and what you are doing. The list goes on. And leaks have made very clear that the “five eyes” governments are willing and able to make use of this.

So there’s no reason to start on a conspiracy theory about the COVID -19 tracking app when there’s a perfectly good conspiracy reality out there. Using the app is not going to seriously compromise your privacy any more than it already is.

Our former Deputy Prime Minister plays to his Sky News audience and says he won’t download the app because he doesn’t want the Government to know anything else about him. Take the word ‘app’ out of the discussion for a moment and think if he did the same thing when phoned by the contact-tracing team – ‘no, I won’t tell you who I came in contact with because the Government shouldn’t know more about me’. Would that be seen as even remotely acceptable? Now put the app back into the conversation: nothing changes ethically, there’s just an overlay of the fear of technology that provides a spurious reasoning.

In any case, sure you are overtly giving up some privacy, but that’s exactly sort the compromise we live with to be part of a functioning society. We give up privacy and freedoms very day because that’s how societies work. They build rules to ensure a bunch of strangers can get on.

And in this case if a short-term loss of privacy is what we sacrifice – in return for saving lives – surely that’s worth it?

Geek in Sydney, COVID-19 tracing app – privacy and efficacy in the spotlight

We all know at one level or another that there is no equity in our school system. But that lack of equity is about to become a health issue rather than an educational outcome. And that is deplorable.

Our Australian school funding system is unique. No one else pours public money into private schooling. No one else splits school funding between levels of government in ways which materially disadvantage public schooling. No one else has been doing those things for long enough that the whole system leaves parents with fewer and fewer choices but to become actively complicit in the system as the weight of votes moves over to this publicly-funded privately-run system.

We all know this at some level. How materially we feel about it probably depends on which side of the private/public split we sit. But anyone taking a dispassionate look at it knows this isn’t a sensible system.

Some of that inequity has become highlighted in the current emergency. Private schools have quickly been able to adapt to distance learning in a way which public schools have been entirely unable to replicate. Not through any lack of will by teachers or administrators, simply through lack of resources.

But the decision to re-open schools while the coronavirus is still a threat is about to push that inequity to a whole new level.

Now, personally I think sending kids back to school is a flawed idea. We don’t know enough about how the virus is transmitted to know if the fact kids are usually asymptomatic means they aren’t transmitting the virus. But beyond that, as a piece of social engineering, it’s going to break lockdown as a concept. Parents will take their kids to school, pick them up from school, interact with kids who’ve been out in a the world. That’s going to make it very hard for people to take other measures seriously.

Anyway, all of that is just background to my main point. My child goes to a public high school. A typical public high school inn many ways. Let me list some of the ways:

• The school has less than half of the proscribed space per child available to it. It is a school built for 500 students which currently has 1100.
• The school has converted storage spaces and offices and every other room with walls to classrooms – small classrooms with kids jammed into them.
• Even then, the school has had to cut back on elective options years after year because there simply aren’t enough classrooms to fit the students into if classes are split into electives.
• The playground space is sufficiently overcrowded that even with staggered breaks older student are encouraged to go out into the community for lunch etc.
• Toilets are a time-and-motion study in how not to do good hygiene. Tightly grouped push-timer taps to minimise water-use, and one soap dispenser for a group of taps.

You get the idea.

Now don’t get me wrong there’s a great deal that’s good about this school. But that’s in spite of, not because of, the parlous state of support from the Government.

So the Government says students should return to school: But it’s OK because the school will enforce social distancing, hygiene, and so on. How? Has anyone making that sort of statement actually visited any school, let alone a government school. Most classrooms are crowded on a normal day so how on earth do they spread the students out? There are no more classrooms to use to spread them amongst. There isn’t any outdoor space to work with. The corridors and stairwells were built for half the number of students who use them – and the minute the bell goes they become a mosh-pit. The only reason the toilets are not overcrowded is because so many students avoid them even at the best of times.

But these problems are not equally shared. There are several private schools within walking distance of my house. They have shiny new classrooms. Expansive grounds. Huge gyms and separate halls. Pools.

Now I know not every private school has the same five-star facilities. But they do share one other feature which will help enormously – they have flexibility. The private schools have a capacity to make independent decisions about how to solve the problem they are being presented with.

Not only do the public schools have little funding to work with, they also have to take direction, in NSW at least, from an enormous, monolithic government department. We’re seen that in public schools trying to respond to distance learning. We’re going to see it just as clearly in issues like putting hand sanitiser at the door to every class. In an inability to get, or pay for, increased cleaning regimes. In capacity to choose which students should get priority in access, or even be excluded if they present a risk. In providing protection, even increased pay, to teachers. In dealing with the nightmare that will be school buses. Again the list just goes on and on.

OK so our system has inequity built into it. Children in NSW are streamed into vastly different educational experiences based on their parents’ income. I think that’s a stain on our society; but it’s one which is a long-term issue. The difference, right now when we are facing an immediate threat, is that that inequity becomes not just a long-term educational issue, but an immediate health issue.

We can’t fix the long-term issue today. But our Government which is directly responsible for the public education system can certainly make sure it doesn’t re-open any schools before it puts realistic measures in place to not just issue blanket statements about things like social distancing in classes, but to recognise the reality the public school system faces and take measures to deal with that up front.

And short-term or long-term, the thing about schools is that what happens in the school system ripples out into the entirety of our society. Long-term inequity is creating a divided, class-ridden country, it’s making us sicker as a society, as a body politic. This short-term inequity threatens us directly by making us all sicker as individuals.

Geek in Sydney, Re-opening schools is a study in inequity

At the beginning of the year I was on holiday in China and chatting with a local. The bushfires were raging in Australia and the locals were all obsessively following what we were doing in response. This man lifted his drink and pointed out to me what he saw as one of the deep differences between China and Australia: that all their leaders were engineers and all ours were lawyers.

Now that point keeps coming back to me as I look at our response to the Corona Virus epidemic.

An engineer would understand the maths. Not necessarily the detail of the maths, but the idea that the maths is not susceptible to argument. If the maths shows you need 30,000 ventilators – well you need to find a way to get 30,000 ventilators. If the maths shows that going into full lock-down will save 10,000 lives, then either go into full lock-down or accept responsibility for those lives.

Unfortunately here in Australia and in the USA and in the UK our leaders’ approach to these problems is to prevaricate, to question the experts delivering the figures, and to find words that let them slide past their leadership obligations.

An engineer knows that decisiveness makes all the difference. If a bridge is going to collapse there’s no waiting around to see what happens next before deciding on a course of action. A lawyer’s instinct is to play for time, to avoid a clear commitment, and to think about responsibility before action.

An engineer knows that clarity is key. Come up with a plan that’s as simple as possible and communicate it clearly. A lawyer is trained to complexity, obfuscation, and a redundancy of detail. You get the idea.

Now I know I’m being simplistic about engineers and lawyers here. The armed forces go through much the same training as engineers and for these purposes might be interchangeable. Politicians and spin-doctors could substitute for lawyers. But the basic principle stands: we don’t need complexity and wordiness; we need to cut through to clarity and solutions.

And sometimes people break out from the mould – for example, Jacinda Ardern has been fabulous in New Zealand with decisive leadership and clear communication leavened with a great deal of human empathy.

Most of our leaders have gone for complexity; for lack of clarity lest they be held to anything; for politics before solutions. The lock-down rules in Australia are unclear and multi-layered. It’s hard to think an engineer wouldn’t have gone down the NZ route and had four simple layers to work through. Our leaders act like lawyers negotiating a contract, with each day seeing yet more twists and addenda making the situation increasingly confusing.

The new employment safety-net is another good example. We could, as a simple example, be using the tax office to hand out payments direct to every individual. Simple, clear, using an existing infrastructure and no middle-person.

Instead we’re going to give money to businesses and then they, assuming they are still in business, will pass it on to their employees. What about when the business fails? What if the owner forgets? What if the owner comes down with corona virus? What about self-funded retirees? What about… It’s complex and is inevitably going to create a summer-storm of rules. And as any engineer knows complex systems are the ones most likely to fail.

What we need now is simplicity and clarity. We need to know where we stand and we need solutions that are focused on really delivering rather than giving the appearance of activity.

Clearly we’re not going to get any new leaders for the foreseeable future. And even if we did, the pool of potential candidates doesn’t look much different from those already warming seats. So all we can really hope for is that our leaders will throw aside the habits of their working lifetimes and channel an inner engineer instead of an inner lawyer.

A surgeon, an engineer, and a lawyer were arguing about which profession was the oldest, and the doctor said, “Well, on the fifth day of Creation, God took a rib from Adam, so surgery is the oldest profession.” The engineer said, “But, before that, God created the heavens and earth from chaos, so engineering is the oldest profession.” And the lawyer said, “Yes, but who created the chaos?”

Geek in Sydney, It’s a crisis: we need engineers not lawyers in charge

You know, there’s a reason people go to university to learn how to be teachers.

The idea that within a week or two we can take centuries of face-to-face teaching practice and just ‘go online’ is simplistic and fatuous. And yet we hear choruses of complaints from public school parents that teachers are not yet conducting Zoom conferences with their children, and those children’s futures will be permanently blighted.

So to start with a reality check – a few weeks of not learning is not going to make a huge difference to most students. The only people with any legitimate concern are those heading into the HSC and even then there wouldn’t be a legitimate concern if the playing field was level. The problem isn’t that all students are missing out; it’s that one group (the public school students) is missing out. So we’re facing an unquestionable equity issue – but don’t blame the public school teachers for that.

Beyond that, missing a week or two isn’t going to make a difference. And missing a few hours in a day will make absolutely no difference. We home-schooled our children for a year while travelling and one of the things we worked out early was that the average school day is filled with a bunch of stuff that’s easily skipped – some of it has wider value, some none at all. But, if you’re looking for core educational value, a couple of hours a day covers most years of schooling until you get into the upper reaches.

OK so it would be great if everyone could just take a breath a remain calm for the moment and give teachers a chance to move their entire working day into a new mode of operation. Yes their entire way of doing business needs to be turned on it’s head. That’s difficult enough but then, in the public school environment, they have to do that on a shoestring budget, with minimal technical support, and in the context of a monolithic IT system. Do they have the computers, do they have the licences, do they have the bandwidth – how do they get any of these?

But these are technical problems that can be overcome. More importantly is what does teaching online look like? The first step for many schools has been to deliver homework online and take the completed tasks back online. I’m not saying that’s not useful, but it’s not teaching. Teaching is not just about delivering work, and ticking off the results against a marking rubric. That’s a mechanical process, not teaching. If that was all that teaching was about, no one would ever talk about the difference that an inspirational teacher made to their lives.

Teaching involves communicating; it involves breaking issues into digestible chunks and tailoring delivery to individual student needs; it involves enthusing students about the subject. Good teaching, like acting, involves an exhausting emotionally draining performance that connects with the audience.

So, I hear people cry, just start up Zoom and do what you normally do but on screen. Well, no. That won’t work either. Twenty or thirty kids in a Zoom conference – half fidgeting, half looking off-camera at what their sibling is doing. How do you control the class? How does your lesson work? What’s the delivery like? How do you work out who needs help? Again not beyond solving – but teachers need time, and training, and support. For that matter students need time, and training, and support to be at the other end of that process.

(If you want to see how easily this can not work take a look at the US late night comedy news shows. They are usually filmed in front of live audiences and you can see the feedback loop working for the hosts as they adjust their delivery to the audience. Watch the latest ones now they are sitting in lonely isolation and you can just see the difficulty they are having effectively delivering their material.)

Anyway, there are other approaches. My personal favourite is the flipped classroom which, done properly, can be fabulous. But once again you can’t just flick a switch and expect teachers to have effective materials ready to roll.

Finally, let’s not forget that teachers are real people with their own problems and anxieties. And major changes to your working life while in the midst of one of the most anxiety-producing events in living history is not going to be easy.

Look none of this is insurmountable. But we need to give our teachers time and support to make it happen. I would argue that giving teachers a couple of weeks without students in which to sort this out would be sensible. But short of that, we parents should just be stepping back and giving them some space – give teachers a break.

Geek in Sydney, Give the teachers a break

Oz Comic-Con is coming to Sydney at the end of the month. Showcasing everything from fan art to internationally recognised artists, celebrities from film and television, comic books, video games, exclusive merchandise and cosplay – it covers everything you’d expect. 

In addition to the usual, Oz Comic-Con is doing something local and different in announcing the launch of SuperAustralians, a story that captures our iconic nation in a range of heroes and villains.

“In an age where superheroes have dominated the screen and the page, it’s about time we have stories that are far closer to home. “

“Assembling 12 heroes from all walks of life, SuperAustralians witnesses the ultimate battle against evil with threats from 12 villains across every state, territory and geographical climate of Australia from the parched deserts in Western Australia to the ice covered Australian Antarctic Territory.

From evil cyborgs and masked bikie-cult leaders to metamorphic racist politicians and ancient demons, there are surprises hiding in every corner of this vast land that reflect Australia’s unique creativity and some of our myths, legends and recent (though sometimes embarrassing) news stories.”

The exclusive preview launch at Oz Comic-Con in September will give attendees the chance to meet the creators of the comic, grab a copy before it officially goes on sale, and discover a new avenue of pop culture. 

Sydney Oz Comic-Con:
September 28th and 29th
Sydney Showground
Schedule: https://ozcomiccon.com/sydney/schedule/

Geek in Sydney, Oz Comic-Con just around the corner, and we get some Oz superheroes

OK so let’s agree that customer service from the telocs is awful. But why?

It doesn’t have to be this way. I accept they are juggling a complex network of technology; I accept that the people selling to you don’t own the infrastructure they are selling; I can grasp the trade-offs involved. But many organisations deal with similar trade-offs without consistently awful service.

I have complained in the past about Telstra’s customer service, but for the last few days I’ve been stuck in a dystopian nightmare with Optus. A fairly simple task involving my mother-in-law moving house has been dragged into farce by Optus’ completely incompetent customer service.

Anyway, my main aim here is to give some thought to why the telcos are providing such consistently awful customer service. And it’s not just me who thinks so – surveys, again and again, show that customer satisfaction with telco customer service is abysmal.

The first port of call is the simplest. This is a complex beast and it’s hard to get right. That thought is backed by the fact that the awful customer service is a world-wide phenomenon. No company seems to have cracked it. But then again, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing it beggars belief that it’s beyond our combined wit if there was a will, and some other organisations based on complex systems seem to manage better. And let’s face it complex systems do not explain sitting on hold for 50 minutes to get to talk to someone.

Then there’s the underlying approach which involves the customer dealing with an entirely faceless organisation. The people you talk to have no identity and there’s no real feedback loop beyond those silly surveys at the end of a call. The person you talk to has no real ownership and there’s little chance of you talking to the same person twice. The fragmented nature of the teams and the systems means that you, the customer or problem, keeps getting bumped around without any impetus for resolution.

The annoying thing about this is that it is certainly true and it is demonstrably solvable. Demonstrably because if you complain to the Telecoms Ombudsman you will get escalated to a team that has oversight and continuity and actually gets things fixed. So it can be done – and the question becomes why isn’t it the starting point rather than last place you get to?

My revolutionary child insists this is an inevitable consequence of capitalism in action. The financial incentive is for the telcos to cut their own cost to customers’ detriment because there isn’t enough competition. This argument seems to be backed by the fact that it is the smaller companies that get the better satisfaction levels (Vodafone tend to come out on top, but it’s not an Everest-like high). That would argue the smaller companies are trying to differentiate themselves partly on service – while Telstra and Optus don’t see a competitive benefit in better customer service, perhaps because they have jointly set the bar so low that it’s hard to see daylight between bar and ground.

Counter-intuitively it’s also arguable, in the capitalism is the problem vein, that the problem stems from too much competition – at least in the context of delivering dividends to shareholders. Companies feeling competitive pressure on profits leads to down-sizing and out-sourcing to cheaper teams. In turn that means poorer service.

Another scenario might be that people buy their service based on two criteria – neither of which are customer service: price and service quality. Most purchases of telephone or internet services start with looking at the coverage available, and the reliability and speed of the service. They then quickly move on to looking at price. Customer service comes a distant third – who is going to buy on the basis of quality customer service at the expense of underlying coverage or speed? The answer is nobody; so telcos will put their effort into speed and coverage first and foremost. The logical extension of that scenario is that it’s simply not worth spending a lot of money on good customer service while you have the capacity to compete on coverage, speed, and cost.

The sad reality of all this is that nothing is going to change until something fundamental changes in the system. As long as Telstra, closely followed by Optus, have the best coverage and speed they will sell on that basis. They will be a some, or a lot, more expensive than the smaller competitors and will not bother to improve customer service because there’s simply no point from their limited perspective. It would take two or three or more services with the same speeds and coverage to force them to start differentiating on customer service and that doesn’t look likely to happen anytime remarkably soon.

Ultimately no matter how you analyse the issue the core of the problem is that there’s no incentive for the telco’s to provide good customer service. In fact the drive for profits in the current competitive landscape means that there’s every incentive reduce expenditure and to shift costs (all those calls and time on hold does cost) to the customer.

A simple approach that actually would have teeth might involve punitive compensation to customers. If profits are all the telcos care about, hit them there to encourage a change in approach. Increasing and real compensation for each day that a problem is not fixed, for each call made, for each ten minutes stuck on hold. But that’s not something that the telcos are going to introduce themselves, that would have to be legislated by, yes, one of the few groups to get satisfaction ratings on par with telcos – politicians.

So if you’ll excuse me now I’m about to make my daily call to Optus. Bring on the revolution, comrades.

Geek in Sydney, Why do telcos all have such bad customer service?