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If you don't subscribe to Optus's "premium" tiers, your service can be throttled to 28.8 Kb/s. From the Optus price list:

'yes' DSL Basic 200MB

• High Speed Data Allowance: 200MB
• Speed Limit if High Speed Data Allowance Exceeded (kbps): 28.8
• Monthly Access Fee (from 15 April 2009): $49.95

'yes' DSL Unlimited

• High Speed Data Allowance: 12 GB
• Speed Limit if High Speed Data Allowance Exceeded (kbps): 64
• Monthly Access Fee (from 15 April 2009) $91.95

Yes, they really call it "unlimited", in the same table with the limits. That table isn't easy to find. You have to go through three web pages, then download several Word documents

That's their DSL service. Their cable service has similar tiers and terms, but slightly different pricing.

When I first heard of Net Neutrality, people had mockups of what they feared ISP's plans would eventually degenerate into. Things like "facebook+ebay+1GB other". It gave me the creeps back then, but what horrifies me is that in less than a year this has become reality to Australians.

Check this out: Optus iPhone plans. Click the "Plan Comparisons". Each one has a "Unlimited mobile access to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, eBay, foursquare" bonus.

The fine print says: "Unlimited use of these services within Australia only. Use of these services is separate and does not count towards your included “Mobile Internet Data Value.” These features are only available to you if your handset is compatible with the service. Optus Mobile Fair Go Policy applies..."

Keep in mind that Australia already has "tiered" internet pricing, because local bandwidth is practically free, while international bandwidth is very expensive. However, this is not what's happening here. None of those sites are hosted in Australia. It costs Optus no less to provide those to their customers than any other site. This is some sort of back-room deal.

If you host a website, or work for a company that does, welcome to second-class citizenship on the internet, unless you pony up the cash and make a deal with every two-bit ISP and Telco out there. Can't afford to do that? Tough.

Welcome to the free internet, where you are free to use all 6 Optus approved services.

So HTC could pick up Palm, have their own (decent) OS and stop manufacturing for Android?

But that would never happen. HTC is heavily invested in Android as it is in WinMo. If anything Web OS would become a third offering.

But what is likely to happen is that HTC will kill off WebOS. A lot of people don't want to admit that WebOS was stillborn. It was a series of bad design decisions tied together with a pretty front end and covered up with a lot of hype and marketing. I predicted that WebOS would be the disappointment of the year when it was released and I'm certain all 300 people in the UK who bought the Pre would disagree with me. WebOS needs to die, HTC is going to continue with Android and WinMo which are actually advancing.

Besides this, I think Lenovo is in a better position to snap Palm up. Whilst HTC are making a profit, they haven't exactly had a smashing last few quarters thanks to the GFC.

Android could be in trouble without HTC, especially down here in Oz, since AFAIK the only android phones atm are the Magic and Desire (coming soon)...

Opt-arse are selling the low end Motorola's, the Dext and the Backflip. With Helstra selling the Desire and VHA looking at the Nexus One it looks like all Aussie carriers will get decent Android phones although why no-one has looked at the Milestone is beyond me.

Worse than these?

How about Australia? Well, Telstra Bigpond has 21Mbps HSPA+ with probably very good coverage (can't find a link), Vodafone Australia has 3.6Mbps HSDPA with (soon to be) good coverage and Optus has a 3G/UMTS network with spotty coverage.

The United States has over fifteen times the population of Australia, yet the U.S. has long been behind when it comes to mobile phone technology. Is it the telco monopolies? Is there low demand? It's weird.

No it's more like this:
Optus spent $5 million creating a 900 page bid proposing an open playing field. I don't think the details are public yet, but that link has the media release. They also fronted a $5 million bond.
Telstra sent in a 14 page memo saying something along the lines of "we'll do it as long as you guarantee our infrastructure monopoly and we wont pay the bond, but we promise to put in $5 billion".
If this gets up, this is a win for all Australian Internet users. "Telstra has said entry-level access to its proposed NBN would start at $39.95 per month for a 1 megabit per second connection with 200MB of download capacity."[ref] This is what we could look forward to under Telstra. More of the same shite. That 200mb includes backhaul too.

I don't mean to criticise you, but have you ever owned any of the new phones at all? I've only ever seen one phone with a colour screen crack. Compare this to the old Nokia 5110 which had a recall for screens just failing. In fact, I've seen more monochrome screens fail or crack then I have any colour phone displays. On the other side, I don't see what makes this phone so special. Almost every phone on the market here in Australia has MP3 Playback support. In fact you can pick up a Sony Ericsson W300i walkman phone for AU$200 as a prepaid option.

Well check out what the major carriers in Autralia charge. Optus, Telstra (shudder), Vodafone, 3. $1AU ~ 0.$7US.

We also get options like free talk time within the same carrier, free sms messages etc. Depends on your carrier and your plant and all that.

My phone is largely used for business and I get a lot more calls than I make. However I do use it quite a bit. I pay $50/mnth for a capped plan that gives me $230 of calls/sms etc. Calls are ~$.30 flagfall and ~$0.1/second. I never really hit the cap.

That aside, to my mind it doesn't matter whether the system in the US works or not. It's just plain stupid to have a system where you pay for the actions of someone else, ie someone calling you. There is no logic behind it.

Blackberrys are a huge thing in Australia almost every mobile phone company sells them, heck even some ISPs sell them, if they come here with their patent crap I wouldn't be shocked if it causes their assassintio, as you know Australians arn't so called normal.

Television Guide:
Blue Healers - Channel 7 - 8:30-9:30
Without a Trace - Channel 9 - 9:30-10:30

Reality:
Blue Healers - Channel 7 - 8:42-9:45
Without a Trace - Channel 9 - 9:36-10:39

We only have 4 GSM-based providers... Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and Virgin.

Each has good plans for certain segments of the population... If you are only down for a short time, and unlikely to have many Australian people to contact regularly, then a cheap prepaid option (from any of the four) will probably suffice.

If you're heading to Canberra, are you going to be spending much time outside the city? GSM service falls off pretty sharply outside the urban centres in Australia... Also, Telstra is generally the most expensive in any category, but has the best coverage outside the city areas...

Incoming calls are not charged in .au...

If you outline your expected call usage, a better opinion can be given...

I have been a vodafone customer for many years now, with no complaints ever... but that's not to say that they're the cheapest for everybody...

I somehow have gotten the impression that the AUS Government is very computer hostile unless it is at the behest of large corporations or pressure groups, could anyone living in AUS give the low-down on some of the problems that plague internet users there?
Sort of right. See the goverment used to own this company called Telecom which provided telecommunications. No one else could, the goverment owned all of the phone lines in the country. Which worked ok.

The goverment finally let other carriers in and in 1992 Optus launched in Australia. In 1997 the goverment sold (I think) 25% of Telecom (now called Telstra) and in 1998 sold enough to give the goverment 51% control (A Brief History of Telstra).

Which is where we are now. Basically Telstra owns most of the lines (because they were paid for by the Australian people) and it costs a fair bit for anyone else to roll out an entire network. But Telstra obviously set the retail and wholesale prices of the lines. And strangely, sometimes, the wholesale prices are more than or equal to the retail. Optus gets around this via thier TV cable services, Alphalink rolled out wireless and iiNet are doing what article says.

There were claims that Telstra blocked the introduction of broadband for it's own benifit and that it has been unfairly competing against other carriers (but I don't think Fair Trade has upheld any of these claims).

In reality the goverement is pushing to sell the rest of Telstra and the Coalition have never quite got enough votes in the Senate to get it thru by themselves. For the last two sales they mad stupid ammendments to appease an independent who calls himself Brian Harradine, who's very into censoring everything, including the net. Thankfully he's going, but Family First managed to get one senator in (and I'm ashamed that it's in my state) and they are a party who... shock horror... want to ramp up net censorship further than what Harradine dreamed he could get.

So the simple answer is it's not that the goverment are actively computer hostile, it's just that thier short sighted plan of selling a monopoly means that they have to be mean to all of us.

I think I might have ranted a bit there, but you should get the general impression of what's happening down here. Oh... and do a search on google for Telstra suck if you need more of an idea... :)

Vote with your wallet people.

My 1500/256 Nella Networks FlatRATE ADSL service came online today. It's using the Comindico IP Network and is a truly unlimited service. Aardvark were even offering cases of Red Bull to those who download the most! That said, I do pay AUD240/month for it (opting to avoid the slower unlimited services which start at around AUD90/month). You can get 'always online' service from TPG starting at AUD19.95/month, with the first 400mb costing ~AUD80, then capped to 10Gb and reasonable rates thereafter. Meanwhile, my 3G NEC e606 mobile handset from three gives me 3000 minutes per month of voice calls for AUD99 - significantly better than the AUD300-500 I was recently giving Optus for around a third of the airtime. I guess this makes me one of the lucky few well connected Aussies. If it weren't for me living in Sydney and being able to justify the expense I'd be putting up with an overpriced, flaky Telstra service like everyone else! I'm still perplexed as to how they have managed to hang onto the Telstra Rewards program for so long - would have expected the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to have raised an eyebrow over this some time ago.

Your quota is measured as the maximum of traffic in and out, which is fairly common. Some ISPs ignore traffic from you and only charge for traffic to you.

For comparison, Telstra charge you up to 19c/megabyte (here 12-16c) for the combined sum of all traffic both directions, and iiNet (biggest ISP in West Aus, second would be WestNet) soft-limit all home accounts (limits are 6GB for AUD$79.95 512kb a/c or 0.5GB for AUD$49.95 128kb a/c) and charge 12c/MB on business excess.

ALL DSL goes through Telstra DSLAMs except on a very few busy exchanges Optus and/or Request have their own DSLAMs. This causes no end of problems for competing ISPs because they have to phone up and ask Telstra to do a "tunnel reset" when someone's DSL screws up, which often takes a day or two to execute.

Note in the Telstra DSL plans avobe that their entry level plan is AUD$10/mo more expensive, and a 512kb plan with only 3GB limit (sum of both directions, remember?) and a max of two users - the cheek! - is $18/month more than I pay ArachNet.

Any DSL through Telstra is unreliable, but it seems that the DSL they on-sell through other ISPs is even less reliable than the Telstra-end-to-end flavour. Just a coincidence, of course.

Telstra have this really bizarre way of authenticating you (and their cable authentication is even "bizarrer") and getting a "tunnel reset" out of them can take two days. RUCC's is noticeably more reliable, Optus's has been rock solid for me, and in terms of works-first-time-OOTB Telstra just isn't on the same planet. And they bill you for your traffic both ways.

I have one client who was dual-homed ADSL through Optus and iiNet. iiNet is Western Australia's biggest ISP, and they started out well, then went corporate on us and bought everyone else (and meanwhile the quality of service drove off a cliff). iiNet is the only ISP in Western Australia which manages to have more DSL downtime from their own incompetence than from Telstra faults. Optus DSL is much more expensive than most others, even Telstra, but OTOH the only time it ever when down was when lightning razzed the modem on the client's premises.

The same client now has a WestNet DSL (DSLAM by Telstra) and is looking at fibre through Request, whose underlying provider is RUCC for their second home at their new premises. RUCC seems to be nearly as reliable as Optus, and notably cheaper.

Telstra is the only ISP I know of in Australia who normally charges you for traffic in both directions. Some ISPs will charge you only for recieved traffic, others will charge you for the max of recieved and sent, but not Telstra.

Before you ask, I use ArachNet, one of the few surviving Western Australian ISPs which is both competent and small enough to care.

cellulars stil suffer from extreemly limited bandwith

Many GSM networks around the world now have the General Packet Radio (GPRS) extensions enabled which offers a much faster packet-switched connection to your wireless device (40kibibits). GPRS is charged by volume, not time, and you always stay connected.

This is the kind of technology that will allow wireless-device gaming to take-off, at least outside North America :-(

I Agree.

In Australia we have one of the lowest population densities in the world - only 19 million people across an area slightly smaller than the US, yet we have some of the best GSM coverage in the world, with some of the best GSM networks.

Take a look at the coverage on Australia's second largest network Optus.

We also have CDMA - but that sucks in buildings.

That throws the whole population-density argument out the window.

I Agree.

In Australia we have one of the lowest population densities in the world - only 19 million people across an area slightly smaller than the US, yet we have some of the best GSM coverage in the world, with some of the best GSM networks.

Take a look at the coverage on Australia's second largest network Optus.

We also have CDMA - but that sucks in buildings.

That throws the whole population-density argument out the window.

I was expecting changes with the singtel takeover of optus. Though, hasn't the takeover just been approved, and not actually happened yet? Even still, changes this fast. I dont think the takeover has much to do with this.

AussiePenguin
Melbourne, Australia
ICQ 19255837

Optus Cable and Wireless is down now as far as I can tell and its 1:55am local time.

Which doesn't necessarily mean it's down due to a Y2K bug; the San Jose, California, USA Mercury News had an article yesterday that began with:

As New Year's Day 2000 rolls around, about all anyone can be certain of is that personal computers will crash, somewhere the power will fail, and airline flights will be canceled. You can bet that credit card billing statements will have mistakes and bank ATM machines will either refuse requests for money, keep your card, or both.

In other words, it will be business as usual.

Not all bugs that occur around the transition from 1999-12-31 to 2000-01-01 are Y2K bugs; there're plenty of bugs to go around....

The Optus Y2K Site claims, as of when I last checked, that

Saturday, January 01, 2000 at 7:33:07 AM
We have no evidence of systems failure due to Y2K at this time.

and, for what it's worth, the Optus home page says

On the 31st December the analogue mobile network begins to close down. Find out how Optus will be keeping you covered into the new millenium in our updated mobile coverage section.

The cable situation in Australia is interesting. Initially cable was laid by Optus to give them access to the local loop so they could totally bypass Telstra. At the moment Telstra owns the local loop and other telcos don't have access to it, so Telstra gets a slice of every call made in Australia that involves a fixed line phone.

To protect its Telephony business Telstra rolled out cable to pretty much exactly the same places Optus did.

Both Telstra and Optus laid digital cable, with the aim of providing phone, internet and pay TV services on the cable. Optus made a lot of hoopla about 20c local phone calls across their cable network, but ran into technical problems and IIRC only in recent times has voice over cable worked for them. They had some similar problems with their cable internet service, which has been in beta for over a year. Telstra have never tried to carry voice traffic on their cable network -- they don't need to because they have the local loop.

Cable in Australia is about to change with Optus@home, a partnership between Optus and @home. They will be offering a cable internet service targeted at home and small businesses, with prices more competitive than those offered by Telstra.

AAPT are introducing satellite soon, which will also add pressure to the high bandwidth internet market.

And I thought 35 cents for a public telephone local call was a rip off...

Australia has flat rate local calls. Optus charges 20c (US 12c) per call, Telstra seems not to be telling... I think it depends upon your pricing plan.

There are two major problems we face with local calls to service providers - the first is the large land mass/small population, meaning that people not living in a city often don't have local call access to an ISP and have to pay long distance rates. The other is that if phone calls drop out while the modem is connecting, thus running up a large bill (our call waiting tends to kill a connection too), then Telstra, who own the lines, and the ISP can bounce the blame back and forth between each other.