This isn't news - they have been blocking port 25 for a long time now. What's new for me is that, since switching from dial-up to broadband, the traffic is blocked despite my subscription to opt out of port 25 filtering. The opt out worked when I was on dial-up, even with a dynamic IP address.
Now that I am on Telecom/Xtra broadband, they tell me the only way I will be able to connect to port 25 on any other than the Telecom/Xtra smtp servers is to subscribe for a static IP address, at an additional cost of $20/month - that's 40% of my connection fee.
To make a long story short, I spent over an hour on the phone, mostly on hold, insisting that it should work. Eventually the support person gave up telling me there was nothing more he could do and escalated the call. A few hours later I had an email from technical support - they had reset their authentication cache for my account and asked me to reset my router.
So, I reset my router and I can once again connect to remote SMTP servers.
It shouldn't have taken so long, and if I didn't know IP and SMTP well enough to build their network for them I wouldn't have had the confidence to know they were wrong when they told me it couldn't be done. But I suppose those who don't know enough are very unlikely to need to connect to remote SMTP servers, so not much harm done from Telecom's perspective.
In summary, it is still possible to connect to remote SMTP servers, even with Telecom/Xtra broadband service - as long as you have hours and patience to work through their helpdesk.
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