Author: Chris

Teacher. Blogger. Podcaster. Asks way too many questions.
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An Open Letter to Telstra on 3G Data Use

Hello Telstra.

I’m one of your customers. I have my mobile phone service with you… the reception is reasonable, at least it seems to be better than most of the other Australian Telcos. You charge a little more for it, but hey, I’ve tried the others and I don’t mind paying a little more for a service that actually works…

But, Telstra, can I tell you what really sucks?

I recently bought a new wifi+3G iPad. It should really be a 4G iPad, but apparently you and Apple can’t agree on what the term 4G actually means. So ok, it’s still just a 3G iPad, and I guess I can live with that. But I’d like to buy some 3G data from you so I can use my iPad when I’m not in wifi range.

Now, for me, that’s not all that often. I’m in wifi at home, and in wifi at work. I could tether to my iPhone’s 3G data when I’m out of wifi range (and I often do) but it would be a lot more convenient if I just had a 3G SIM in the iPad itself. So I want to buy an iPad 3G data service from you. I don’t think I’ll need much, probably no more than a few hundred MBs each month to be honest. Some months may be way less – possibly even no data at all – and other months might be heavier usage. I don’t know for sure.

I’d LIKE to be able to buy a decent chunk of data from you – maybe a few GBs – and just use it till it runs out. After all, if I pay you for it, I should be able to use it till it’s gone, right?

Apparently you don’t see it that way. You let me buy data from you, and then after 30 days you just let whatever is still left over expire. Just like that. Gone. Don’t you think that’s a bit unfair? I mean, I bought that data. I paid for it. Why do you need to expire it at the end of 30 days? Why can’t I just keep using it till it runs out?

When I asked the customer service rep on the phone why this was the case, the probably-accurate but rather-brazen answer was “Because we’re a business and we need to make money”. Bravo Telstra, nice way to put the customer first.

This policy that all of the Aussie telcos have of selling data to customers and then insisting it be used in a limited period of time is a rort. An absolute ripoff. In any other industry you wouldn’t get away with it. Imagine if I filled my car with petrol and then didn’t drive it much that week, but at the end of the week the remaining fuel in the tank just “expired” for no reason other than it was now the end of the week. Fair? I think not. And yet, that’s what you do with my 3G data.

I’m not sure I understand the logic of why you feel the need to expire my unused data at the end of 30 days. If I’m using my iPad a lot that month, there’s a good chance of me running out before the 30 days is up anyway, and I’ll probably just buy more from you. Win-win.

And if I don’t use all the data that month, then it hasn’t really cost you anything anyway, since I’ve already paid you for data that is still sitting there, unused. Sure, I will use it eventually, even after the 30 days are up if you don’t automatically expire it on me. Maybe I’ll run out of that 3G data halfway through the next 30 day period, and then, guess what, I’ll probably buy some more from you. And instead of being a resentful customer who hates you for ripping me off by just taking away something I’ve already paid you for, maybe I’ll end up being a happy customer who loves you for being so fair minded.

Maybe I’d even tell my friends how wonderful you are because you treated me fairly and allowed me to use the data I bought from you in a timeframe that worked for my needs, not yours, and maybe when I do buy more data from you, I won’t do it  begrudgingly, thinking of you as a pack of bastards who are just out to rip me off.

Or maybe if you created a policy of treating customers like me with enough respect to let me use what I’ve paid for when it runs out, not just at the end of some arbitrary 30 day period, you might just be surprised at how many other customers would be interested in being treated the same way. Maybe even those hard to find New Customers.

Right now, you are getting my money for two 3G data plans, one for my phone and one for my iPad. But, frankly, the iPad data is a bit of a ripoff. Not because it’s a bad service or I don’t want to use it, but because you seem to feel that it’s ok to charge me for a product and then, if it is partly unused after 30 days, you feel it’s ok to just take that unused part and make it vanish, even though I’ve paid for it.

You see Telstra, there’s nothing fair about selling someone something and then just expiring whatever they haven’t used at the end of 30 days. It sucks. You might be able to get my business, but you get it begrudgingly and you don’t win me over as a customer. I may give you my business today, but as soon as an alternative comes along, I’m out of there because you’ve not done anything to earn my loyalty to your brand.

Eventually, when the resentment becomes bad enough, I’ll decide that I really don’t need 3G data on my iPad that much anyway, and just go back to tethering on my phone’s data plan. And then you lose me completely as a customer for that second data plan. The irony is that if you just let customers buy data and use it till it’s gone, you’d keep me. You’d have happier, more loyal customers, and probably more of them, who would gladly top up their data plan again and again because you’d be offering a service that works on their terms, not yours.

Have you ever stopped to consider how many potential customers you don’t get because of this short-sighted approach to providing a 3G data product under fair and reasonable terms?

Here’s a tip. Treat your customers with respect. You have a good product technically, but your customers don’t love you. They endure you. They tolerate you. They stay with you because you are less worse than the other telcos. If you treated us with more respect by recognising that when we pay you for a product we deserve to be able to use that product until it’s finished, you’d probably find a whole lot of new customers that you never knew existed and a whole lot of existing ones that felt far better about doing business with you.

Think about it.

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Can The Network Deliver?

Ok, here’s a little test of network theory.

Some background. On February 14 this year, I asked my beautiful partner Linda to marry me. She said yes. Yay! So we are planning a wedding. In fact we are planning two weddings, one in Canada and one in Australia. As you can imagine, there’s a fair bit of expense involved in doing that.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Linda spotted a contest on Facebook where you submit a photo or short video, and get people to vote for you. As most of you know, I haven’t always been very complimentary about my Facebook experiences, but just to support Linda I reactivated my dead account so I could cast a few votes.

Long story short, we’ve ended up doing ok in this contest, in fact for much of the last few weeks we were leading. Unfortunately, right now we are not leading, and have dropped back into third place. The people in number two spot will, I assume, get disqualified since they have submitted copyrighted material, so I’m not too worried about them. But the people in first place are on a real burn and are adding votes VERY quickly…

Normally, I’d just shrug it off and say it’s all just a bit of fun. No reason to take it too seriously. But the first prize is $10,000. Yes $10,000! I probably don’t need to tell you just how helpful that would be for making wedding plans!

So here’s what I’m asking – partly because I’d obviously really like us to win, and partly because I’m really curious to see just how much a network of people like you guys might respond to a request like this.

Could you vote for us. Please. I look at it this way… we are trailing by about 1100 votes. According to Feedburner, this blog has about 1100 subscribers. If each of you voted just once we would be back in the race. If each of you voted twice, we would be hard to beat. If each of you voted just three times, we would be planning the wedding(s) that Linda deserves.

So what do you say? Would you vote for us? Please?

Here’s the link… http://goo.gl/QRN3u

Yes, you need to be a Facebook user, and yes you need to Like the page temporarily to cast a vote. But it’s easy and quick. And you can vote once each hour, as many times as you like. Just 2 or 3 votes from each of you would make a huge difference.

I’d REALLY be grateful. And I’d love to be able to tell this story about how, when I needed it, the network really delivered.

Thanks!

PS. I should mention the contest closes at midnight on Saturday March 31 (Sydney time). So if you want to help us out, just be aware that you’ve only got a short window of time to do it.

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Philly to Sydney with Year 2

If you like, you can skip right to the bottom of this post and just watch the video, but I always find the story behind the story kind of interesting. So I thought you  might like to know a little bit about how and why this video was made.

It started out with a simple tweet from my buddy Kim Sivick in Philadelphia.  It started a conversation that went something like this…

Do I know anyone who might make a quick Welcome to Australia video?

I sure do.

And besides, I owe Kim a favour. When I was running blogging workshops with our staff last year I was hoping to tap into the experiences of some very blog-savvy educators by getting them to Skype in and talk to our teachers about the realities and the practicalities of using blogs in the classroom. When I asked for volunteers on Twitter (where else?) Kim Sivick  was one of those who generously responded and agreed to spend time talking with us to share her expertise.

I also got to meet Kim in person at ISTE in Philadelphia last year too, so it was nice to “close the loop” on our virtual meetups.

Kim’s idea was deceptively simple. Get our kids to make a short video about a virtual trip to Australia, and in return her classes would make a video about a virtual trip to Philly for us.

With virtually zero planning, I dropped into one of our Year 2 classrooms and asked the teacher there, Lisa, if her kids would like to make a video for these students in Philly and she jumped at the chance. In no time, Lisa and I had a bit of  a brainstorm on what sorts of things we might do, and she started working with the kids to write a script using GoogleDocs. The script gradually evolved and took shape over the next few days.

I’d been wanting to do some work with chromakeying, or greenscreening for a while, but had just never gotten around to it. It wasn’t something I’d done before, but I suggested to Lisa that if we shot the video of the kids in front of a greenscreen, then it might be fun later to try and drop in the images of various parts of Australia as backgrounds. She thought that sounded pretty cool, so I went to our IT Director and asked if I could buy an inexpensive greenscreen kit. It was one of those things we’d talked about buying for a while, but never quite got around to it. With a reason to need it now, we went online and ordered it on the spot.

When it eventually arrived we set up a date for the shoot. The classroom was transformed into a studio for the morning with lights, camera, and plenty of action. I used iPrompt Pro on my iPad to transfer the script, and then held it up just under the camera lens as a  scrolling teleprompter so the kids could read the script as naturally as possible. We shot it on a Sony HiDef camcorder at 1080i/50. It took a few takes to get things right, but the kids really worked hard to do it was well as possible. Being able to repeat a section over and over in order to get it right was a valuable part of the learning experience.  When it came time to shoot, we all had fun calling out things like “Quiet on the set!” and “Rolling!”  and “Action!”, and running things just like a real movie set. I think the kids had a lot of fun recording it.

I took the footage back to my desk and dumped it all onto my MacBook Pro to ponder out the best way to edit it.  Although I definitely do want to get the kids doing more video work themselves, getting them to edit the footage was not really the learning goal for this particular exercise… it was all about their performance for the camera. After some experiments with iMovie I eventually decided that I’d cut it together with Premiere Pro instead. Premiere Pro was certainly not a program that I knew well, but this seemed like a great chance to get cosy with it. I’m glad I did… it’s a very impressive NLVE tool and I like it a lot more than Final Cut Pro 7.

I always try to make sure we set a good example for students regarding copyright, so it was important that all the background images were available under a Creative Commons licence. I think it’s really important that we demonstrate to our students that you can actually make worthwhile digital media without continually breaking copyright law. All the background images are CC licensed, as are the two pieces of music that I included, both from jamendo.com. The two videos were not released under CC, but using their YouTube contact address I wrote to the owners of both and both were more than happy for us to use their clip. One even offered to send us the hi-def footage! Most people are pretty generous if you just ask. Remember, Copyright doesn’t mean “you can’t use it”, it just means “you can’t use it without permission”, so if it’s not CC, then do the right thing and get permission! It’s just not that hard. (Publishing works under a Creative Commons license makes it much easier of course because it’s essentially an “up-front” permission which is pre-granted as long as you stick to the uses stipulated by the copyright owner)

After a couple of days of editing over the weekend, I did the final render to a 720p .m4v file and uploaded it to YouTube as a private link so the Philly kids (and our kids) could see it the next day.  Here’s the finished product…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYPHlWtQ-uw

It always nice to ceremonialise things that are a bit special, so we set a date for a premiere screening and invited all the Year 2 mums and dads in to watch. When the Year 1 Philadelphia kids watched it, they all wore Aussie bush hats and set up their classroom like the inside of a plane to watch the video.  We had our screening this morning and the movie played to a packed classroom of excited Year 2 students and their parents. Proud parents. Excited kids. Performing for a real audience. Making opportunities to create and practice and iterate. Immediate feedback. And lots of fun and laughs. An authentic learning experience?  You better believe it..

Kim tells me that her kids are working on the sequel for us, showing us their virtual trip to Philadelphia, so we are looking forward to that.

Lisa, our Year 2 teacher, now keeps asking me when we can do our next global project, and is coming up with lots of cool ideas for how it will fit into next terms syllabus.

Overall, I think I’d consider this whole thing a win, wouldn’t you. 🙂