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What to do About Australian Telecommunications?
alc asks: "In Australia there is a fairly interesting debate going on about communications. The market has been open to competition for a few years, so we have the cheapest rates seen.. well, ever. The problem with this, however, is that while competition on prices has been going on service has dropped significantly and the questions of equality have come up. If you are as far away as a 4 hour drive west of a major centre as Sydney it takes up to 2 weeks to get a new line connected or repaired, whilst in the city, next day service is almost commonplace. This means that a large number of Australians are being left behind in the so-called Internet Age. Half the problem is, how do we get Internet Access to them? Cable is definatley not viable. There is only cable layed in parts of the highly populated East Coast. Dial-Up access, which is the present solution is plagued by STD charges (there isnt always a PoP close by) and shocking line quality. Sattelite/Wireless seems like an option but its speed is only one way and it dosnt have good latency. This means that interactive content like video conferencing isnt viable. On top of this we have the government wanting to sell of the rest (51%) of our national telco, saying that service in the bush will improve under privitisation.. yeh right. What do you think needs to be done to bring the rest of Australia's population up to speed?"
Keep 'em in Australia, we got enough problems of our own.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
To what extent is DSL rolling out in .au? This won't reach into remote areas, but it does have a range of several miles, which could make it viable in at least some rural areas, so long as demand is high. I believe IDSL (which uses an ISDN-like encoding) has a longer viable range than the more familiar DSL technologies, and this might help matters.
For remoter areas, I'd suspect that some kind of wireless system is the only approach that's likely to be viable in the forseeable future. Aren't the remoter areas of Australia already quite reliant on radio communications? This might set a precendent for wireless IP.
Anyway, I hope things do move along. Like most UK-based geeks, I'm entirely sympathetic to the cause of getting telecos to roll out decent internet access technologies...
I think you may be exagerating the details a bit there mate. For starters there are very, very few two week waits for services out of the high density areas. 84% of all service calls logged in the bush are rectified in under 4 days. This is a distance thing, not a QoS thing.
Sure the lines are old, but not that old. The copper cables laid were put in to last for amny more years to come. In remote areas, copper cables link to 'satellite' centres and are up-linked to the rest of the network via fibre, microwave or satellite.
Like all things, it comes down to a business decision. There will never be fast or free access for the internet in remote areas. The return on investment does not justify the initial outlay when only 7 people in the town use it.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
The only thing that will allow decent coverage in the bush to kill telstra as it is now and that isn't going to happen. Its big and bloated and its been a luxary tax to find the goverments general fund. The average profit last year is several thousand dollars per employed person in the country.
The one comment about DSL is kind of right. 2 mb DSL can be had at a price but so can dry copper pairs. An E1 install here is AU$1800 (US$1080) setup for the first 10 chanels of the 30. MCI is charging $150 if your within their service range (which is just the "down town" areas of Melbourne and Sydney). My local phone is hooked to the only exchange in Victoria that has an ADSL DSLAM and I can not get ADSL at all. I've got a cable modem (it uses Foxtel's cable and Telstra's service). It had a 100 mb cap on it when I signed up and a $.24/mb charge. Telstra is the only "major" isp that charges by the kilobyte of data transfered. They say its $.19/mb for ISDN but they prorate that. The phone charges for 128K ISDN is somethign like $260/mo.
The Aussie phone system is a copy of the worst of Europe. Most coper pairs are soldered and not crimped but they are starting to use thouse nice 3m connectors that don't induce noise and keep the connection from oxidising.
The only hope for telcom here is to sell off Telstra and then force the goverment to regulate it like a monopoly and like the its a nice tax collection department. Once that happens then the real profit margin can be found and then it can be taxed at a proper level to provide service in rural areas. What decent service in rural areas means will never include ADSL like services but should be able to provide decent wireless. Some of these areas are so far away from anythign else no one will care about high power radio systems since there isn't anything to interfere with.
Telstra claims its the cheapest phone company in the world. And it is if you don't use the phone at all.