Slashdot Mirror

That's incorrect. http://www.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20070618/pdf/312zj3xm qjxvpl.pdf states that Tasmania gets 45 WiMAX access points, along with 15 ADSL2+ exchanges.
The only problem with that is that at the moment Telstra is the sole provider of backhaul across Bass Strait, which allows them to charge more for transit from Hobart to Melbourne than it costs for transit from Melbourne to Los Angeles.

The single biggest issue with foreign investment is currency. I'm an Australian. If I buy shares that are listed on an Australian stock exchange (we have several; the Australian Stock Exchange, aka ASX, is just the main one), I need to settle the transaction in Australian dollars, drawn upon an Australian bank.

If I wish to buy shares on (for example) a US stock exchange, on the other hand, I need to settle the transaction in US dollars, likely drawn upon a US bank. Yes, I can buy a US dollar cheque in Australia and send it off, but there are time restrictions on how long I have to get the cleared money to the broker which complicate things.

So that takes care of buying the shares. As for selling, it's much the same story. But there's the added fillip: when deciding whether or not you've made a loss or profit on the stock, you have to take into account the currency movements. For example: if I buy $US1,000 in shares when $US1.00 = $AU0.50, and then sell those same shares for $US1,500 when $US1.00 = $AU0.80, I paid $AU2,000 for the shares, and sold them for $AU1,875. In the context of the US market, I made a profit, but in the context of Australian currency, I made a net loss. It can also work the other way around, of course.

In short: when you're doing foreign investment, there are at least two levels involved that make the investment riskier (and note that I use the word "risk" in the financial sense, meaning uncertain, not dangerous per se). Unless you have serious money to invest, it's not worth the hassles, IMO.

Actually, local data arguably costs more if your're not in anti-compeditive agreements with your buddies (*cough* Telstra Optus AAPT MCI *cought*). In fact, some consumer ISPs are [apparently] bigger than one of that group (AAPT) but they are still forking out lots of money per month because the "Group Of Four" (as its known in the industry) is only interested in locking out the superior competition.

Some smaller ISPs absorb the high per megabyte costs of pushing data down Telstra ADSL ports to unmeter traffic going through peering exchanges such as PIPE Networks or WAIX because it simply costs them less (and gets customers).

In fact, three major ISPs (beside the four) - Internode, Comindico and Primus already have a backbone on the west coast of the U.S and Internode and Primus are already talking about video (and Internode just needs that for a full triple-play service) to the home completely over their backbones. (If International bandwidth was such an issue they probably wouldn't be talking about that).

disclaimer: Happy Internode customer stuck on Telstra Wholesale 512/128k port. Thank you Ziggy and Alston for screwing Australia over. Thank you Sol for stating the bloddy obvious, that being Ziggy and Alston should've spent $3bn in the past few years. See the 56 page admission of guilt and other stupid things

P.S Unlike the U.S Australia is not covered all over in HFC/Cable networks for DOCSIS - two telcos discovered in the mid-1990s that no one watches subscription TV and stopped rolling out new cable.

MOD PARENT UP!

I don't know if Adam's Platform has been discussed on Slashdot before, but it was one of those classic "we can compress video 100x tighter than MPEG and decompress it realtime on a 286!" type claims. Good to see them getting spanked, as described in that report to the Australian Stock Exchange..

Juicy highlights:

• after uninstalling the APT codec and rebooting, the APT video files mysteriously still played!
• The team that evaluated the codec found that it had "what looked like the exact characteristics of VP3"
• Adam Clark claimed he wrote the codec using ResEdit! LOL!

MWC

I think the Dirac project is fantastic and is a good example of public money being used for the public good.

The Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) site doesn't work properly with Mozilla 0.9.9. When you try to get a stock quote by entering the stock code and pressing 'Go', nothing happens. A popup window is supposed to appear with the quote information; this works correctly in IE, and Konqueror (of all things). And there's plenty more where that came from (it's just that I was taking a look at the site with Konqueror before I read your post).

This company is gonna have to raise a whole lot of money to make it happen. The chances of this actually happening do not look good.