Telstra, a massive Australian telecommunications firm, has shuttered its BigPond Second Life (SL) portal, affecting up to 100,000 users including close to 2,000 regular users who rely on the portal for unmetered usage of SL, which is a bandwidth eater, particularly in a country like Australia where users pay different fees based on the amount of Internet usage.
The news came as a surprise and a disappointment to many Australian users of SL, a lot of whom, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, are "socially isolated or disabled."
The move, according to an interview with Telstra in the Metaverse Journal, is the end of a two-year experiment for the telecom company that yielded some ambigious results, according to BigPond spokesperson Craig Middleton.
"From our venture into Second Life we learnt a great deal in a variety of areas, including online community engagement and how to foster event-based traffic – experiences in relation to the in world support team and management of frequent in world events."
Middleton was coy about financial specifics except to say "we were very happy with the popularity of the islands and the interaction they allowed us in-world."
An SL user to the Sydney Morning Herald that the move seems unfair.
"They [BigPond] did not stop us from buying their products; they did not deter us from upgrading our plans, from entering into contracts with them; they encouraged us to purchase Internet security. Now they are asking us to pay to remove ourselves from our contracts,” said the user.
“By removing the unmetered usage from Second Life will actually remove the ability of so many to be able to remain in Second Life and to be able to remain in contact with friends. Those that suffer from disabilities, depression, etc will once again become isolated. This is totally discrimination against the housebound, the disabled, the depressed, the gamers,” the user told the Sydney Morning Herald.
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