Telstra boss blames Australia for resignation

The mindset of a select number of Australians is almost incestuous.
Anyone not born in Australia, with "Australian heritage" is considered an alien.
Hell...they even hate the British, when most of their ancestors were British in the first place!

Keep your spiders and lovely hot weather - I'll stay in Rip Off Britain.
Anyone's welcome here (Unless you try to make an honest living! Then you're screwed out of everything they can get their hands on!)

the blow in that spent a fair bit of time in USA probably never met an aussie, since he imported his own team to assist manage Telstra. Sacked a lot of aussie technicians so we cant get phones fixed.

$35third MILLION for about 4 years work at reducing the telcos share price by about a third.Good bye and good riddance to you Sol The bully in the school yard gas taken is shiny new ball and run away,laughing under his breath at the gullible Australian whilst calling us racist.He didnt even have the decency to say it to our faces.

Australia is a very multiculteral place, saying Australians are racist is just rubbish.

The truth was Sol was far more interested in maintaining Telstra's monopoly position then providing leading edge services. It took smaller companies to push ADSL2 - Telstra was very much content to sit on it's slow ADSL network, with average speeds of only 256kbps.

Eventually the Australian Government started launching initiatives to improve net access but Telstra didn't want anything to do with it. For a multi billion dollar federal government funding package Telstra submitted a tender of only 35 pages, and omitted one of the specific conditions the government required (there were only three). Sol didn't play ball - he just sat there comfy in the knowledge no project could proceed without Telstra's infrastructure.

Eventually, unable to work with Sol, the government announced it would build a new network, managed by a new public company, and it would legislate to break up Telstra if required. Unable to take this, Sol scuttled back home.

There's plenty of racism in this country, but that's got nothing to do with this idiot having been a complete disaster.

On the other hand a weakened Telstra isn't a bad thing, and if his mismanagement accelerates the separation of Telstra's wholesale and retail operations, then all the better.

Well we must be bad in Australia if we are worse than the United States of America......
In reality all people are racist to some degree, it is essentially built into our tibal mentality and it will not go away unless we do some serious genetic modification.
Sol's problem is that he brought his confrontational and "I am superior' attitude to Australia and this did not go down very well.

If incompetant, over paid, loud mouth corporate executives can be considered a race, then Australia is an extremely racist country.

Maybe such racism doesn't exist in America?

This man was a disaster for Telstra. Australia does have its racism issue, but I've been too many places in the world, and Australia is definitely up there with the least racist of all of them.
This is the country that likes to ban Christmas Trees from schools so we don't offend non-Christian religions.
This is the country that very publicly said sorry to what we did to the Aboriginals.
I could list a shit load, but I'm hungry and can't be arsed. I think its important to not mistake arrogance and pride for Racism. Because we are most definitely not the latter. We just love ourselves more than anyone else.
Love ya!

I don't know what that twit was on but he left for various reasons ... I heard he didn't pay his phone bill before he left either.

We Aussies are a loveable lot.

If you don't like us then piss off ... Like we give a toss where you come from.

We are too lazy to fire off rockets and detonate any underground atomic blasts either.

What is with that knuckhead running North Korea? Can someone slap that idiot.

There are too many sunny days and beers to be had to be squabbling like chooks over something as silly as this.

Sol is the man who deliberately instigated an extremely hostile and confrontational approach towards the government and ACCC (Australia's competition watchdog) and sued the government by claiming that local loop unbundling amounted to an unjust taking of property for which Telstra was not being justly compensated.

Under his watch, Telstra:

* refused to turn on ADSL 2+ in exchanges that could support it if there wasn't competition from other ISPs forcing them to do it.

* refused to put in a comformant bid on the the first version of the national broadband network if the government didn't promise to grant them a monopoly over the network after the buildout.

* scuppered the national broadband network plans by implying that they would sue the government if they didn't compensate Telstra for access to the "last mile", and as a result, forced the government to go to a FTTP solution (actually, this might turn out to be a blessing in disguise).

So no, Australia isn't racist, we simply hate Sol Trujillo because he threatened to drag Australia kicking and screaming into the technological dark ages. He advocated deregulation not for the sake of increased competition but in order to protect the incumbent.

By the way, Australia is a country where all the telephone networks interoperate and you can migrate cellphones easily from one carrier to the next. Having the ability to call anyone at any time is considered a god-given right. Contra that to America's mess of a telco system and one might question which country is more "backward".

How dare this man who gained over $35,000,000 from this country complain about us and our culture.

I am British born and Australian raised and I have never felt anything but welcome in this country.

He is not so smart, people do not like those who critisize others it shows and immense character flaw.

I'd bet you're all white. It's easy to not notice racism when you're white.

People who live in Glass houses should not throw stones. The United States seethes with racism and backwardness.
He should consider the LA riots & the fact his country goes to war because of racist leaders who hate anyone not a WASP. I Hope he enjoys getting fingerprinted by his government for using a mobile because he is of Hispanic descent & they are trying to reduce crime. If that's not another glaring example of a US racist policy I don't know what is. Oh wait its too late both the US & au governments missed the boat yet again, he already came to AU and stole 34 million...

Ever since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Austria's taken a bum rap. Crikey, no wonder Aussies tell other folk to "Kiss me where your eye won't meet me... Lick your cigarette then kiss me... Lick your eyes and mine and then hit me..."

Good ridence to him too.
Sol was nothing more than a bad used car sellar who was still acting like a yank!
All telstra sharehoulders can blame him and is yank tactics to try and bully his way to get what he wanted with the government, while blowing share value down the dunny.
the only reason the usa rich love mexicans is due to the fact they work for $5 a hour so they can drive around with their overseas cars.
Quite funny how he was very happy to take his 30 million for destroying broadband compition for many years in oz.
I would like to say from all telstra shareholders and all broadband user in australia and say "GOODBYE AND GOOD RIDENCE, and let the door hit you on the backside on the way out"

WTF r u talking about, r u getting Austria and Australia mixed up? god, u stupid American just shut up.

And yes Telstra for the past 4 years has been a disgrace, Overcharging rental lines for ADSL, which in a way was good to force good competition with other companies bring out adsl2, but they have been ripping us off for too long. And to say this is a racist country, This is one of the most multi cultural countries in the world. He ruined the shareholders and ruined our interwebs, Good by Sol u greedy idiot.

So not true, He's just a bully annoyed he couldn't get his own way.

Chris, if Telstra submitted 35 pages they would've win the tender haha. They actually submitted 11 pages for $5 billion funding. If I bid for 11 rooms cleaning tender I would probably submit more than 11 pages. But that was the style of the sofisticated Sol and his guru Donald.

because he didn't know how to do business in Australia, as opposed to the US. You cannot have the public, your customers and the government offside! Ultimately, it was the shareholders who suffered under his useless reign.

Now he's crying over his own inability to understand Australian culture. I'll give a hint - we don't care that you're rich and powerful, we don't care that you're of Mexican heritage, we don't care that you head our largest telco. You cannot barge in and attempt to do business your way, and because of that, you're going home an utter failure.

As an Asian brought up in Australia, I have not been subject to racism since primary school.

Adios.

The only way Australia is 35 years backwards is in our IT infrastructure, and oh look that was Sols responsability.

What he did for Australia's IT and internet services has truly made our country a backwater, and he has a lot to answer for.

Australia is racist, they like to say "I'm not racist, but ..." and go off on rants about the local blacks getting this and getting that. Australia's first inhabitants only got the vote back in the late sixties, prior to that they were hunted like vermen - yes shot. Many took to booze as a tranquilizer - and still do. Many of the 250 diffrent languages and tribes lived a nomadic exstance - they had no farming skills and painted their hands on cave walls. For the 100,000 years that they were here before the white man they would hunt with fire. 100,000 years of burning this country, now it is thought they we need to keep burning it as good land management.
I worked at a Telstra Wireless call Centre a couple of years ago, I think it would be honest to say that Sol got many more Australians online that the previous Telstra campaigns. Total plebs - not newbies - I call them plebs - people who didn't know where the start button was. People who had possibly taken a Library course in computing - 1 week or two days etc.

Sol is just an incompetent bully boy CEO that didnt get his way, trying to stifle competition instead of making Telstra efficient and competative. I thought he was some sort of a reject from USA big business that Telstra was stupid enough to hire (Telstra is such a dinosaur).

Didnt know he was Mexican till I read this news story.

There are racist people in every country, and we do certainly have our share. Australia is no better or worse than America, Germany or England.

I work in a very large Australian computer technology retailer and I can tell you that Telstra has a bad, bad name when it comes to attitude and service.

Customers constantly complain but are often left with no alternative due to their superior network coverage.

If you worked for telstra in a call centre "White Kiwi", you should have known that your job was there to help people, some not knowing anything to many knowing a lot. Such contempt for the average person does not surprise me. Plebs? How about just confused customers?

Prior to the 60's they were hunted and shot like vermin? What planet are you from? Aborginals were recipients of terrible treatment, but what you are saying is hyperbole. There are large volumes of irish-aboriginals, german aboriginals and chinese-aboriginals where I am from. Many non-aborginal australians had good enough relationships with aborginal australians to begin families with them.

Unfortunately until recently, many cultures in the world spent a large proportion of their time hunting, enslaving and controlling each other while taking resources for self gain (Perhaps things haven't changed so much, just how it is done).

Sol was trying to do the same with our IT services.