Telstra BigPond recently removed Open Office from their unmetered downloads section, as OO competes with their BigPond Office product. People have also been claiming that BigPond has removed anti-virus software from their unmetered downloads section for the same reason - that free-as-in-beer-for-home-use products like AVG competed with the non-free BigPond security offerings.

So, I checked it out. Sure enough, the unmetered file area used to contain an anti-virus section, but now it doesn't. I fired BigPond an email about it, and the CSR who replied wasn't exactly truthful. The relevant section of the email is as follows (my emphasis):

Thank you for your email dated 19 Dec regarding your usage enquiry.

BigPond has not removed any free anti-virus software downloads from your unmetered file area as it has never been the case.

Unless you have a Security program through BigPond, any third party antivirus software downloads that you do on your computer will be counted towards download usage.

So I responded with the following:

> BigPond has not removed any free anti-virus software downloads from your unmetered file
> area as it has never been the case.

Examining the history of your download page in the Wayback Machine archive (http://web.archive.org/web/20070320082627/http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php), you can clearly see that on the file downloads page there was a category titled "Anti-Virus Software".

If you look at the page http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php today, you can see that there is no anti-virus category available.

So, could you please explain to me why Telstra Bigpond no longer provides unmetered downloads of anti-virus software? This is a significant hindrance for users trying to secure their machines at low cost.

Obviously, it's BigPond's server, and they can put up whatever they damn well please for unmetered download. But it's disturbing that they seem to care more for sales of their own security suite than whether or not their users machines are actually secure.

I think it's time to stop procrastinating and start searching for a good alternative to BigPond ...

UPDATE - 20th December 2007

I received an email from a different BigPond CSR today - prompt like last time, but this time truthful.  That said, there was no explanation or apology for the lie contained within the first reply.  This time the CSR wrote:

We understand that you are looking for free anti-virus software but unfortunately, BigPond now only offers subscription based security package to protect against spam, viruses and phishing attacks.

I can draw a number of conclusions about this:

1. BigPond doesn't care when CSRs lie to customers. 
2. BigPond it is more concerned with selling subscription-based security packages than with the actual security of customers PCs.
3. BigPond is concerned that its subscription-based security package isn't sufficiently attractive for users to choose it over easily available free alternatives.