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P2P throttling? Not here.

Exetel do, and we know of this only because they've been vocal about it; other ISPs may do it with more subtlety.

Forbidding servers on residential connections? Not here.

The Whirlpool broadband survey 2008 disagrees (search for "not allowed to run server", optus certainly restricts it).

So while the majority of ISPs don't do it, you shouldn't make out that it's all sunshine and roses in bandwidth cap land; some of the larger ISPs (Telstra and Optus) measure both uploads as well as downloads when considering your monthly bandwidth cap too (which seems to be an effective way to reduce p2p since you'll hit your cap that much faster by "giving back").

I agree that shaping connections rather than billing for excess usage makes more sense for ADSL/Cable connections though; it's much less daunting to get throttled as opposed to being charged extra. Internode have implemented a "Data Block" system that allows you to purchase chunks of bandwidth to extend your monthly cap in a pinch if you're about to get throttled (i.e. it isn't cost effective to do regularly) which could be worth looking into later on.

One more thing, if you do implement caps you'd want to look into some sort of monthly usage meter that's easily accessible to your customers. Net Usage Item is an example of a Firefox addon that tracks usage from various ISPs that helps people avoid overrunning their caps.

Its common knowledge that Windows has an inefficient TCP stack as far as higher speed broadband connections go.

Unblocka and TCP Optimizer are two apps commonly mentioned on the Australian Whirlpool forums.

Turn out was disappointing. The Brisbane protest was probably the most successful, but of the thousand people on Facebook who said they'd attend only a hundred turned up. Kudos to those who did.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/rally-rejects-rudds-internet-filter/2008/12/13/1228585168416.html

The Sydney rally was a disaster. Poorly organized, it was supposed to start at 11AM but didn't start till 11:40AM. When they did it was a very poor speech by of all people some wannabe-politician from the "Sex Party", and by some dufus with a guitar who thought this was going to be his break into the music world. Those few who attended just wandered off.

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1102985&p=35

> there was 1/2 a million for the anti Iraq rallies, I guess since the public couldn't stop the government on that one they just can't be bothered anymore.

True. The people got out and protested but the then Howard government ignored them. The people said "well, what can you do?", went home and re-elected Howard anyway. LOL Western Two-party Democracy.

But back to the protests... the organizers of the Sydney one should be shot. I went to a few of a the war rallies after the big one and they were a poor effort: organized by students whose egos were overblown at their now found (and very short lived) celebrity. If they try these anti-censorship rallies again, they need some decent organizers. Get rid of the hangers on like marginal parties no one will ever vote for and any wannabe musician who is friends of the organizer. Get someone from the Greens or even the Liberal Party to speak. My enemy's enemy is my friend if you will. This was an opportunity lost through sheer ego. Sure the Greens/Liberals would have got on board if anyone asked them. Next time get EFA: they've got far more experience at lobbying than the Sex Party clowns do.

I noticed the protests received marginal coverage from the mainstream media (at least for the Sydney protest their lack of coverage was deserved). They're probably hoping the net dies anyway.

Parent post inaccurate.

Optus is not a model 3G network, nor has its GSM
network that preceded it ever been. Posts from current and former Optus employees like this one exhibit this. Back when I was on them a few years back, GPRS latency was regularly in the 600-1000ms range with regular connection timeouts*. Switched to another network, and boom, down to 300ms. My understanding is Optus runs GSM calls at half-rate bandwidth as well.. Definitely noticeable if you answer if you answer an Optus GSM (not 3G) call from a landline.

Telstra's network looks far superior in operation. (Of course, they have also priced their 3G broadband options to keep hordes of users off the network unless they don't have a choice)

* The latency sucked so much that the Treo 600 I was using at the time often froze momentarily while surfing the web with Blazer or AvantGo. Didn't happen as much when I switched networks.

There is a thread over at Whirlpool about this: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1101155

You do not have access to this forum.
Go back

so i did.
and here i am.

This is totally insane. There is a thread over at Whirlpool about this: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1101155 A child has not been abused. The rational behind the child porno laws is to prevent children from being abused... Or so I thought.

Rod Coronado is a madcunt! http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1089803

In this post MM says they got carrier status in 2000.

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1079033&r=17059102#r17059102

Funny its not on the list you supplied though. Perhaps carrier status is different than common carrier? It doesn't look like it though, there are a lot of ISPs smaller than iiNet on there.

Internode and iiNet are the two awesome ISPs in this country, although there are lots of smaller ones. You'll want to avoid the ISPs that charge $180/GB on any of their plans for excess usage such as Telstra, Dodo or Optus. This is not a typo. That's 180 Australian Dollars for every Gigabyte you go over your allowance. For example, Optus's 'Yes Fusion $79 plan comes with 4 GB and $150 for every Gigabyte over that. Needless to say, they've got their had stuck up so far their own bottom that they can see daylight through their own ears. But even they completely oppose the plan.

A certain Mark Newton who works for Internode is also an extremely outspoken critic of the censorship plan. But Telstra, iiNet and Internode, likely 3 out of the biggest 5 ISPs all have important people saying that the filtering won't work.

Broadband Choice is an excellent overview of the choices out there. Check out Whirlpool if you want to know more about the situation.

Internode and iiNet are the two awesome ISPs in this country, although there are lots of smaller ones. You'll want to avoid the ISPs that charge $180/GB on any of their plans for excess usage such as Telstra, Dodo or Optus. This is not a typo. That's 180 Australian Dollars for every Gigabyte you go over your allowance. For example, Optus's 'Yes Fusion $79 plan comes with 4 GB and $150 for every Gigabyte over that. Needless to say, they've got their had stuck up so far their own bottom that they can see daylight through their own ears. But even they completely oppose the plan.

A certain Mark Newton who works for Internode is also an extremely outspoken critic of the censorship plan. But Telstra, iiNet and Internode, likely 3 out of the biggest 5 ISPs all have important people saying that the filtering won't work.

Broadband Choice is an excellent overview of the choices out there. Check out Whirlpool if you want to know more about the situation.

Hmm, here in Australia we have Whingepool

Right. Fixed that for you.

Hmm, here in Australia we have Whirlpool for exactly that. The forums are very active, and all of the major ISPs have employees who get involved to at least refute rumours and clarify information about their services. It's being able to get unfiltered comments from customers which is the most valuable, though. It's a very useful resource.

I know it's bad to reply to your own posts, but someone posted a link to a thread on Whirlpool that Michael Malone has replied to. I just had to include the link because it shows you what kind of company you're dealing with. The managing director replies to a thread on a consumer advocacy forum and uses language like:

... It is not sensible to stay out of the trials. If we do that, then the government will sign up a couple of pissant ISP's from some small regional location. They will run the trials there and then say voila, it worked, perfect results, no slowdown. Then it will be legislated and enforced. That's stupid.

...

There is no point sticking our heads in the sand on this. I want real data that demonstrates why this is dumb, even to someone as slow as this minister.

Now, perhaps this is part of grand scheme to get this filter in place, but if so, it's so masterfully orchestrated that I think we may as well give up, they're too good to fight. :P

Credit to ghmh's comment for the link the Whirlpool thread.

You are correct to doubt. TPG isn't owned by iiNet.

The only company that has been bought out by iiNet that has retained its own name is Westnet and that happened earlier this year.

TPG merged with Soul earlier this year as well but that's about it

You are correct to doubt. TPG isn't owned by iiNet.

The only company that has been bought out by iiNet that has retained its own name is Westnet and that happened earlier this year.

TPG merged with Soul earlier this year as well but that's about it

Is here, in which an iiNet user pleads with them to not go ahead with the trial, and is replied to by Michael Malone (the head of iinet). Whirlpool is the main news / forum site on Australian broadband news and information.

I concur with the original poster, and that the ulterior motive is not about blocking child pornography, but instead about:

• Trying to keep the independent senators who hold the balance of power happy, so they can get them on side to help push their other legislation through, (specifically Mr anti-gambling and Mr christian)
• Give the government the ability to control access to information - there is no opt out. (Remember - we're not allowed to know what's on the blacklist). This is largely encouraged by:
• Big media, who are slowly losing control over information as most of what they publish gets republished on the internet in some form, rendering their traditional distribution channels obsolete(and thus potential advertising revenue falls in a big way)

Australian censorship has always been pretty hopeless... - We still don't have an R18+ classification for games (although we do for movies, and print media), so games that would fall into that category are refused classification (and therefore can't be sold). This mandatory internet filtering would take things to a whole new (unwanted) level.

Unfortunately, despite Michael's best (and appreciated efforts), there's still nothing stopping them from continually moving the goalposts... and when challenged they'll continue with the "If you're not with us, then you're against us, which means you're pro-child porn" rubbish. Sounds kind of like the always attack never defend strategy endorsed by a certain science fiction author.

Ah Richard Alston and the 4 Million Dollar website.

http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/news/?id=1107

Why do we put people with arts and law degrees in positions like this? surely some degree of technical education is required?

Probably on a pair gain line.

Go to the Whirlpool Broadband Choice Plan Search and have a play. Then compare with broadband access in <insert your country here>. The conclusions are left as an exercise for the reader.

I have never heard of a plan that does not count both uploads and downloads. Is there a specific example of a plan that excludes uploads?

Most (all?) of Internode's plans are a good example - http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/isp-9-1/internode-home-adsl.htm - there may be some caveats to that, but for the most part I understand there is no limit, which is great for the P2P fans - no need to worry about being shaped due to uploading too much.

This download quota system is standard practice in Australia. They typically fall into 2 categories - fixed monthly cost (when the quota is reached, your speed is throttled back to dial-up) and uncapped (charged $X for downloads exceeding the quota).

Many plans also count traffic in both directions toward your quota, so the uploads generated by P2P software can result in a significant reduction in your download traffic.

The uncapped charges can be EXTREMELY nasty - for example the Telstra BigPond plans charge (http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/isp-1/telstra-bigpond.htm) 150 per Gigabyte after exceeding a quote of 200 Meg. So $1 per Gigabyte after a quota of 250 Gig doesn't sounds all that bad!

He wasn't alone.

There was a large number of people trying to find Linux 901's on Whirlpool. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1011353

Many ended up doing what he did, and got the XP one even though it wasn't really what they wanted.

Part of the reason for lack of stock was thought to be that the Linux version was supposed to have a larger SSD (to make up for the cost of the XP license). But they were allegedly in short supply.

The debate has been raging for over 7 months on the Australian Broadband Community web site www.whirlpool.net.au See: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=cleanfeed Current debate: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1079347 Many Australians have taken to using their graphic design skills to get their message out. See: Posters and Stickers here http://www.bbinternet.info/content/view/8/7/ It has been the governments attempt to mussel the debate by industry leader, Mark Newton, that has really fired up the community. Cheers WTW

The debate has been raging for over 7 months on the Australian Broadband Community web site www.whirlpool.net.au See: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=cleanfeed Current debate: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1079347 Many Australians have taken to using their graphic design skills to get their message out. See: Posters and Stickers here http://www.bbinternet.info/content/view/8/7/ It has been the governments attempt to mussel the debate by industry leader, Mark Newton, that has really fired up the community. Cheers WTW

Actually, it doesn't usually reduce costs at all. The latest WoW patch (as in your example) is actually distributed via Akamai (yes, the torrent and HTTP seed). Akamai actually co-locate with my ISP, so it costs them only for the local loop to send me this patch - they don't even need to pay for any international bandwidth at all! But you know what? It costs the same to download this patch as it does to download a 2GB movie from Pirate Bay.

Well, that's assuming a few things:

1) all your p2p traffic from the Blizzard downloader comes from Akamai peers. My experiences with it, this is not the case - there's a lot of regular peers that it comes from. This is also contrary to Blizzard's on FAQ about them paying for the bandwidth.

Typically I seem to get less than 5-15% of a Blizzard download from their dedicated seeds anyway.

2) not all ISPs have akamai caches, and I suspect not all of them would considered it 'unmetered' traffic anyway (at least one Australian ISP doesn't, or at least didn't, so it's of limited value to users when counting bytes)

http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2007/

The question was specifically for an opt-out filtering system. The new plan is for a filtering system that does not allow anyone to opt out. Therefore it is much less likely to gain support and much more likely to gain opposition. For the lazy, the opt-out system had 13.3% support and 73.8% opposition.

For an idea of what its like to live in a country that has to get all of its internet data from USA / Europe, read this article, and watch the embedded flash video.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/communications/soa/Net-neutrality-is-an-American-problem-/0,139023754,339292161,00.htm

FYI I pay $70AUD (~$48USD) per month for a 1.5mbit / 256kbit DSL line with 40Gb of data.

This is from one of the more expensive / boutique providers in AU. You can get DSL a whole lot cheaper, but the quality of the connection, speed of downloads and support suffers greatly.

You can use this page to get an idea of what is available in AU.

http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/?action=search

Like I said, you can get DSL cheaper, but sometimes good things are worth paying for.

I can not easily make a good argument for you, I can make a poor argument that most of the slashdot users (and especially Aussies) will understand.

Free to air television is for the dogs! It's over for my generation and even some of the generation above me (I'm 30)
I can no longer even contemplate the concept of actually scheduling my life around watching a TV show at X O'clock.
Even recording from the TV, over here shows have many things done to them, such as
Inserting up to 20 minutes of ads per hour
Using that 'loudness' technology on the ads
CUTTING PARTS OF THE ACTUAL SHOW OUT to fit in more ads (no, not joking)
Airing the shows 3 / 6/ 9 months after they air in the states.
Showing the shows out of order...............!

The list goes on.
It might be taboo but a hell of a lot of people grab their shows this way, it's the only way to get them as far as I'm concerned.
Also while I'm at it, what about porn? What if the govt decide porn is illegal? I'm a youngblooded male, I want to hunt for porn on the net, there is free 'legal' porn out there, what's to say they don't block redtube or cheggit or whatever the trendy sites are now?

What about when the filter makes a mistake? What about when slashdot is classed as illegal?
The list goes on and on, it's bloody crazy.
I'm very disapointed in Labour with this, I'm not a huge Liberal fan (no, I don't vote, sue me) so I can't say I voted for them to win, nor can I say I voted this policy in but it's quite frustrating and stupid.

The real issue is, at this point according to the whirlpool thread http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=967413 it does actually seem to be getting some momentum.
I really find the internet bloody slow enough as it is in this country, most of us have DSL over cable, so that's 60ms instantly, then we're mostly hitting US sites so that's a total of about 180ms in the very best cases - when you're doing your general browsing, this really adds up.

I will have no hesitation in circumventing the law and using some kind of VPN, Proxy, Tor or whatever else will get me past this stupid thing, the frustration is having to do so in the first place.

Yes this is absoloutely real.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=967413

SharpDevelop is better than Monodevelop, and is BSD licensed. It also, frankly, pwns the crap out of Eclipse. The only reason I don't use it on Windows (its much faster than VS, btw) is that its refactoring tools aren't yet on par with the excellent Resharper add-in.

You missed the most important part, which was the cross platform part of it. SharpDevelop works under Windows, nothing else. Monodevelop is more or less a port of SharpDevelop meant to work with GTK#.

As far as cross platform stuff goes, Monodevelop is all you're left with for C# stuff (if you discount Eclipse plugins).

Regardless, you can compile cross platform binaries with Visual Studio. If your time is worth so little that the $200 license for Windows is too high, then I respectfully suggest you reconsider either your rates, or your career.

You know, the "Linux users only use Linux because they're too cheap for Windows" meme is a little old. It has nothing to do with the license for Windows -- I just find it to be an inferior operating system for both my development tasks and my daily computing tasks. The fact that you naturally assume that I'd rather waste my time either maintaining a completely separate virtual or physical machine simply for the privilege of having a marginally nicer UI for designing apps which are only guaranteed to work as advertised on a single operating system?

As it stands now, I have no trouble using Eclipse as an IDE... I just avoid using C# for anything other than CLI tasks. Saying that anyone who doesn't use what you use is cheap and/or underpaid and/or incompetent is just plain condescending. If not ignorant. Use what you're comfortable with, and don't dog other peoples' choices in operating systems. It's just a single tool, and not worth scrapping my entire workflow and machine installation to accommodate.

Actually you can get up to 20Mb on.

http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/?action=search&exc=1&state=all&class=0&type=res&cost=0&pre=200&conntype=1&conntype=4&conntype=5&speed=1500&upspeed=0&contract=99&needhw=yes&upfront=999999

To add to OP, with Bigpond's "download limits", if you exceed your cap, you get charged 0.15c per extra megabyte downloaded, which works out to be $150 per a gigabyte see here, in comparison to Westnet for example, another Australian ISP which charges $6/GB (see: here.

I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but for most ISP's other than Bigpond, a scheme called "shaping" is in place for nearly all plans, so that when you exceed your download limit, your internet speed gets slowed to 64kbps for the remainder of the month (as opposed to paying for any excess you use). Bigpond have slowly been introducing their plans that "feature" unlimited downloads (shaping) - which have been a defacto standard for most other ISP's for long before. Bigpond sales have also been known to flat out refer to these "Liberty" plans as "unlimited downloads", without explaining the concept of shaping (believe me - I have had to explain this to several people).

As a subsidiary of the previously state-owned monopoly, Bigpond is a joke. I went from 256kbps @ 12GB for $60AU per month (believe me - not my choice) with Bigpond, to ADSL2+ speeds (realistically for me: 1MB/s~) @ 21GB (now 30GB) for $60AU a month with my current ISP (iiNet). On top of that, Bigpond tends to be rated far lower in customer service (see: here) than most other ISPs.

I'm pretty sure that shoddy assembly processes are common to all the computer producers. Especially apple... lol

Yea, I've heard quite a few tales about how Apple's logic boards go bad too often. With me it's been the opposite. I'm typing this on my third Mac and the only hardware I've had with one was when the floppy disk drive failed in one I had 8 years before it fail. Of four PCs I've had, 3 running Windows and 2 running Linux (one was dualboot), though three had to have the mobos and hdds be replaced in the first year of ownership.

Falcon

That's not fair off from the situation in Australia, where bandwidth caps are the norm. It's possible to get an ADSL2+ plan where you could exceed the monthly download cap in less than 5 minutes!

I live in Australia, and I'd kill for a 250Gb plan that doesn't cost half of the average weekly wage.

You should note also, that those plans are for 50gb to about 100gb. We don't have 250gb caps here...

I'm hoping to take delivery of a WRT54GL for precisely this reason. I can stick maradns on it, which does its own recursion, keeps an in memory cache, and randomizes the source ports of its queries (avoiding the other big DNS security issue that's come up recently.) This will be nicely platform agnostic, so the Win XP box on my home network is saved from being fdisk'ed for another few months..

(Of course, because my ISP uses PPPoA and not PPPoE, I've also had to get a Speedtouch 536, which can relay via PPTP to the WRT54GL. Oh well..)

This is how we're charged in the UK and Australia. Works for us.

Look at whirlpool.net.au, and an example plan comparison. You pay for your bandwidth and your total usage/month.

See, in these countries companies aren't allowed to promise what they can't deliver. In the US it appears that an ISP can promise unlimited downloads/uploads at maximum rate, until reality catches up and customers try to use what they've been promised. Then the rest of the world has to pay for the mistakes of an under-regulated U.S. market while the companies pander to their shareholders. Yet again.

$1/gigabyte is all kinds of reasonable when you see the prices that telco's in other countries get away with charging. take telstra bigpong cable in australia. you can pay AU$40 (about US$38) and receive a "massive" 200Mb each month (with line speeds of up to 30000 kbps down / 1000 kbps up) and then if you go over that (in around 53 seconds) you can pay the wonderfully low rate of AU$150 / gigabyte (about US$142 / gigabyte). you'd have to be a sucker to sign up, but it's heart breaking to hear about old folk who didn't know any better being ripped off by such a bunch of greedy pricks

Here are some links to show this is not just me BTW:

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6035_102-0.html?forumID=5&threadID=260482&messageID=2563323

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/638297.html

.. kind of lucky, anyway.

We have a website which provides pretty detailed information on what the ISP's are up to. Because there are so many members, I think the ISP's are sitting up and paying attention to a degree, because it's really not that expensive to change providers now.

So here it's just a matter of choose your carrier and tell the other telco's to piss off.

Why would Australia, already with very limited high cost bandwidth to the rest of the world, bother building out cable to the small remote isolated island of Guam?

The link would connect Australia to what VSNL claims is the "world's largest designed global backbone capacity network, spanning across 4 continents and comprises of major ownership in 206,356km of terrestrial network fibreoptic networks and sub-sea cables." Guam already has existing connectivity to Japan, which would provide a gateway to the US and other countries.

Thank God I live in Australia where ISP's *must* describe exactly what the customer is getting for their money thanks mainly to the ACCC and TIO. We've even got a nice community built search form based on that information so you can easily compare ISP's.

Optus and TPG both implement transparent proxies for load balancing.

Try Whirlpool http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/
Lots of better plans there.

Hello http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=910501 Unfortunately, our rights are not protected in the constitution. However, having said that our laws are followed by our government to the best of our knowledge! I hope to raise awareness of this if any of you could call +61 02 6277 7480 and +61 03 9650 1188. Preferably using VOIP with no number sending and tell senator Conroy that mandatory isp filtering is not the way to go or blah - depends on your point of view. Please contribute do not feel pressured by international bounds. In addition, please email senator.conroy@aph.gov.au . It is ironic because Kevin Rudd had some fun ad "scores" in new york a while back. No filters were used then ;) Lets CONTRIBUTE http://petitions.takingitglobal.org/oznetcensorship?view=signatures&viewall=true . WEB 2.0 FIGHTS BACK.

There's a pretty in-depth discussion up on Whirlpool about this issue. Whirlpool is an Australian forum based around the idea of helping out internet consumers and discussing problems and concerns with the industry. Link is here: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=910501/

Probably because there's not enough to gain.

Only tech-savvy people will be bypassing this practice by using bind or another caching name server, and name service traffic doesn't really have enough volume to warrant interception for cost-cutting purposes, really.

Of course, ISPs can still be bastards. I'm constantly surprised by how broken the internet is here in America. I thought I had it bad in Australia. Apparently I actually had it good, with an ISP that doesn't play games with my connection, for any reason (and the CEO personally would make that claim on the consumer-run ISP forum whirlpool.

Now if i could just get that ISP to start installing ADSL2 DSLAMs in America. Screw this cable and FioS crap.

My Australian ISP (Internode) was facing a similar issue with Australia's version of the BBC (the ABC). The ABC migrated their streaming content over to Akamai servers. Internode, like many ISPs, already hosts an Akamai node on their network. Unfortunately this doesn't help much.

From Internode's CEO: "Even if we wanted to (and we don't) - Akamai is such a dynamic system that we can't predict or control (or tell you about) changes in which Akamai cluster the content might be served from - it might be from inside the Internode network, from outside it via a peer, from outside it via a transit link, or even from some other country."

Later he said: "We did ask [ask ABC for permission to mirror]. We can't." And, "The ABC aren't allowed to make commercial deals/alliances with anyone. They can buy stuff, but they can't cosy up to a commercial company in a way that might look like sponsorship/endorsement (I'm paraphrasing here, but this is something very familiar with anyone who has dealt with government in general - not just the ABC in particular)."

The BBC and the ABC operate on very similar principles. It's likely that the BBC can not allow any commercial entity to mirror their content. It's their own rules rather than any licensing restrictions that'd stop this.

My Australian ISP (Internode) was facing a similar issue with Australia's version of the BBC (the ABC). The ABC migrated their streaming content over to Akamai servers. Internode, like many ISPs, already hosts an Akamai node on their network. Unfortunately this doesn't help much.

From Internode's CEO: "Even if we wanted to (and we don't) - Akamai is such a dynamic system that we can't predict or control (or tell you about) changes in which Akamai cluster the content might be served from - it might be from inside the Internode network, from outside it via a peer, from outside it via a transit link, or even from some other country."

Later he said: "We did ask [ask ABC for permission to mirror]. We can't." And, "The ABC aren't allowed to make commercial deals/alliances with anyone. They can buy stuff, but they can't cosy up to a commercial company in a way that might look like sponsorship/endorsement (I'm paraphrasing here, but this is something very familiar with anyone who has dealt with government in general - not just the ABC in particular)."

The BBC and the ABC operate on very similar principles. It's likely that the BBC can not allow any commercial entity to mirror their content. It's their own rules rather than any licensing restrictions that'd stop this.

Pick a year, and enter "Undersea fiber cut " into google.

Then realize that *your* recent memory isn't a very good thing to base odds on. Better to search.

This one particularly stands out from my top-of-the-head recollection: http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/388

There has been at least one major undersea cable disruption ever year of this decade. Either maintenance accidents, shipping accidents, earthquakes....