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Pity Broadband Users In Australia
danwarne writes: "Pity Australians who have few other choices for their broadband internet than the country's incumbent telco Telstra.
A broadband community website, Whirlpool, has revealed that the giant telco is planning to RAISE prices on broadband again for the second time in just a few months.
The telco, which has had a technically disastrous ADSL rollout is also going to be offering incentives for customers to sign up to its cable internet service (HFC) instead, in the form of faster plans for cable customers (until now most customers -- cable and ADSL -- have been limited to 512Kbit download speeds).
It seems clear from Telstra's plans that they are preparing to abandon the 'messy' residential broadband market and focus on more profitable business customers." In the next few weeks, lucky Australians will find out if this "leak" is accurate.
With the way the broadband industry is in Australia and the way that the Australian government here still regards broadband as only a "fanciful" thing, it is no wonder that a telco like Telstra can survive.
We really have no choice. For instance, I used to live in a newly established estate, but because the developers did not design it with trenches, we could not get broadband cable.
As for ADSL, Telstra is selling it wholesale (it owns most of the exchanges) to competition at or higher then it sells to customers... how's that for competition.
I'm from .au; and my ISP is connexus
They basicly re-sell telstra's ADSL service (they run their own routers, telstra routes my ADSL service from the local loop to their data center)
The speed is 1.5meg down and 256 up. I pay around $au120/month for this, and I can run as many servers as I want, and hog all the bandwidth that I want. No real AUP.
I have to pay per meg over my bandwidth allowance, but I rearly go over that.
That is all well and good, but doesn't really help anyone in Sydney looking for broadband Internet access.
From the FAQ:
It is a shame, I would love to get faster that 56k, I'm in a unit block very close to the city, and I have ZERO options.
Learn to Improvise
The way it is here (Alice Springs) is that there is some 12 ISP's who claim to offer internet access locally, upon contacting them, its more like 8 - of those only one offers ADSL (telstra)
their are options like satalite however its far to costly for anyone i know, even if you have your own hardware telstra INSIST you purchase theirs...
this is also the case for adsl - i rang telstra today and said "im going on holidays and i dont want to give the person housesitting my adsl account cause i know they will use over my limet - can we set up a seperate account for them just for the month - nope, minimum period is 3 months and you still have to pay the connection charges and buy the adsl router from us - i proceeded to explain that i had a router the person woud use and that the connection was already established because i was using it... no matter what i said they wanted to milk me for every cent) you see telstra DONT CARE
I have an interest in satalite technoligy and have the required lmb's i told the guy from telstra - i also said i had the required dish for satalite, again i could only get it if i purchased everything from them
further to being in remote australia some readers may find it intresting that "remote australians" are not looking for crazy subsidisation because we KNOW that should things be fairly priced elsewhere it wouldnt be such a big deal - a ISDN SPC can be relativly CHEEP if you want to run your own data on it between your own offices, its when you want to place internet trafic on it and connect your isdn to an isp that your charges grow so drasticly - living here in alice i expect to pay about 15% on top of the average sydney price but local ISP's are still charging 60$ a month for a 150meg download limet on a regular 336 modem account
a big problem is that people WANT to listen to online music and communicate accross the world while working from home, this CAN NOT HAPPEN - and people dont want to JUST USE what TELSTRA have neet little arrangements for, its not the telstranet its the internet - the "free sites" thing is nice, but they are not that good and it really removes the idea of being on the internet - if your going to have free sites have *everything that doesnt go accross international carriers* and this is prety easy to see with tracert / traceroute folks
i dont see the justification behind charging on a per use structure (telstra own the company they buy from), i have work collegues in england who get 100% free adsl, it came with their telehone...
the way i see it is IMHO the legistators dont understand what they are legistating and so dont understand how to draft up the legistation to take effect properly - they are too old and cant grasp the ideas properly its obvious they want to acheive certain things, but they dont know how to acheive it so write sill blanket laws...
telstra charge for LOCAL TRAFIC within their own network for crying out loud, how can this be alloud - technically they charge for person 1 to send data to peson 2 on the telstra network however person 2 on the network doesnt get charged for the data they get from person 1 (CRAZY!!!! - i cant even play games with my neighbours without being charged or running ethernet over the back fence)
in the week straight after getting adsl i was portscanned constantly from all over the place - at first i was worried, but now i just filter it out, but i DO FEEL like im getting ripped paying for incomming trafic that i didnt ask for because someone on the internet took an intrest... i also "hear" that telstra include the PPOE encapuslation packet data in your 'data charge' so your 3gig is actually 20% less as the ppoe packet encapusliation is roughly 20% of the data... AND they "redefine" 3gig as 3000MB even though their own website's FAQ defines a bite as 1024 bits - i wonder if i should worrie about some redefination of MB at 1000 bytes thus actually reducing the 3gig limet even further
but dont worrie telsta is not just rude when it comes to adsl - for instance you will be charged 3$ a month to NOT BE LISTED IN THE PHONEBOOK - now thats just crazy - a monthly ongoing charge for not wasteing paper.... is that legal??? perhaps i should finish here for risk of going OT or OTT
So, if I told you guys that I was getting 1.5Mbps down and 640Kbps upstream with my Telus DSL up here in Canada for only $40CDN/month ($26US) and unlimited bandwidth, I can be sure you guys will wanna chase me down the street, beating me with a pickle fork and stabbing me with a baseball bat?
--
God did not create the world in seven days; he screwed around for six
days and then pulled an all-nighter.
I hate to break it to you, but I would NOT expect any reasonable sort of ADSL (Always Delayed Slightly Longer) before 2003 in Ireland! If you want economic ADSL try 2004 or later! Currently Ireland is an Internet backwater (and the politicians are far from understanding this). Errorcom^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hircom announced an October 2nd launch of their ADSL service simply to squash any other broadband providers AND to delay the rollout of ADSL as long as possible (if you were supplying 99% of the pots and isdn lines AND 90%+ of the leased lines would you want to launch an ADSL service?). By announcing their intention to launch (and alleged pricing structures) they have forced the Office of the Department of Telecommunications Regulators and their main competitor into legal wranglings to prevent the launch of the service. The basic stumbling block is that the ODTR will not allow Errorcom (fsck them, they seem to be squashing mirrors , the latest casualty which had extra info and links to mirrors is now in googles cache alone, of the already taken down errorcom.com site) to launch the service until the wholesale pricing is agreed (so errorcom can't jump the market thanks to their public funded monopoly). Unfortunatley over 3 months since this debacle there has been no progress and a lengthy war in court is expected. Even if the wholesale prices are agreed tomorrow and both companies launch their services the minimum 30 days later you should not expect the prices to drop, Irish telecoms operators (and in particular errorcom and es(h)at) have a terrible history of pricing by errorcom charging the most ridiculous amount conceivable (you've seen the proposed prices) and then the "competitors" knock maybe 10% off the price to have a slightly less ridiculous extortianate service.
Basically you should be resigned to modem or very expensive ISDN for the next year in Ireland :-(
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
In .de, you're either in a big city, or you don't have much of a choice other than T-Online, which constantly increases prices, and aohell, which requires a proprietary client that isn't even available for any sane OS. And then the govt complains about a lack of IT professionals in the country... They're just all running away to places with sane net access!
Well, I'm interested in how things work out in Oz because I'm a resident of the United States, which is similarly populated by some large cities and vast territories that are expensive to wire.
This is rather different than, say, Europe, where 90% of their territory is populated with a much greater density of people.
Some have said that Canada's heavily regulated telecom's have provided nice service up there and they, too, have some sparsely populated areas with some urban centers.
So of Australia, USA, Canada, who has done the best job of getting broadband service to the people?
"Provided by the management for your protection."