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.

Comments

Optus

[smallstepforman]

Thank god for Optus. Its cheaper than the gov. sponsored Telstra, it doesn't have ridiculous caps, its faster than Telstra and the service is hassle free. In neighbourhoods where both Optus and Telstra have rolled out cables, Optus is mopping the floor with Telstra guts. Unfortunately, only portions of large metropolitan areas have access to Optus cable.

Quick question - why is Slashdot so interested in DownUnder? Most of these telco idiosynchrocies come from Telstra, not Optus.

Re:Optus

[MicklePickle]

Yep, I have been on Optus for over a year now. All the other people I know of who joined Telstra have had terrible problems with reliability, download speeds, and funky bandwidth forming.

On Optus it's open slather pretty much. During the early period there was even no download limit at all. People had Rx rates in the 200G a week.

Re:Optus

[Stormie]

Unfortunately, only portions of large metropolitan areas have access to Optus cable.

Also Optus only provide cable to houses, not apartments. When I enquired about getting connected, as soon as they heard the slash in my address, they said no. Apparently it costs slightly more to hook up an apartment (longer wire needed, I guess) and since they're overflowing with demand, they ignore all apartment dwellers in favour of the more profitable house dwellers.

So here I am with Telstra, wondering if my bill is about to go up $6/month as this rumour would have it. :-(

Re:Optus

[NightRain]

It's available in Brisbane as well, so the 3 major cities are covered.

Ray.

Re:Optus

[NightRain]

Not quite. The problem is more to do with the fact that Optus does not want the expense of wiring up units because it's just not worth their time and money when they can't know how many people will be using it in each lot of units.

And they are hardly rejecting unit dwellers from over demand. See this thread on WP. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t =1630972932

They're actually shutting down nodes, which to me says that they're not interested in being in the game for too much longer.

Ray.

Go wireless

[jamesbromberger]

Help the free public wireless networks: Perth, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide,Sydney, Gold Coast (QLD), Tasmania, etc.

We had this coming.

[TommyBear]

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.

ADSL in other countries

[muffen]

If you think that Australia has it bad, take a look at how Broadband is doing in Ireland. The prices are like USD100/month for a 512/128 kbit connection with a 3 GIG DL LIMIT!!!!

If you feel sorry for broadband users in Australia, I don't think I have words for what you should feel for broadband users in Ireland.

Re:ADSL in other countries

[bfree]

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 :-(

PLEASE don't pitty me!

[DavidJA]

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.

Re:PLEASE don't pitty me!

[Boiling_point_]

Yeah, but your volume allowance is 500 megabytes per month. That's not as useful to many potential customers; I suspect paying ~US$60 a month for 500mb would send a shiver down the spine of many /. readers.

Interesting footnote - the company director of XIS, one of only two companies in .au offering realistic competition to Telstra, is still a teenager. I hope he's up to the task, launching a broadband service nationwide the same week that Telstra raise their prices!!

Broadband in Ireland

[Draoi]

Consider yourselves lucky, guys. Here in Ireland we're still struggling with ISDN as being the 'broadband' solution, both for home and business users. And this is almost entirely down to the national telco (eircom) delaying and delaying on the rollout of (A)DSL. It really sux. I'm typing this over ISDN using both B channels. It costs me the price of a local call ($.05) X 2 every THREE MINUTES. And all for a massive 128K bandwidth! Whoopee!! 8-b

[grumble, growl]

For more details on Ireland's Broadband issues, check out Ireland Off-Line

Irelands situation is far worse

[Gavintheman]

At least the people of Oz can get residential broadband! As of yet there are are no ADSL or similar products available to the residential market in Ireland. When it was originally proposed, the old semi-state monopoly, the now privatized Eircom, was going to charge 130 per month for a 512k with a 3GB cap! The regulator wants this reduced and ADSL rollout has been delayed yet again. Cable on the other hand is sold by NTL to a small area of Dublin city. Help us out at www.irelandoffline.com

Not horrible, just mixed

[dirk]

While I agree the terms aren't all that great, the changes are both good and bad, not the horrible tragedy the article makes them out to be. Cable is going up to "full speed" (with no explanation of what that is), and is probably done because of the restrictions with DSL. It's a lot easy to get cable speed up high than DSL, and I can't blame them for emphasizing DSL over cable (as long as they offer both, who cares?).

The lowest plan will include move MB and be cheaper on DSL (while cable prices stay the same). The extra MB charge will also drop. This is nothing but good.

The 1GB plan is a bad value no matter which service you use apparently.

The 3GB plan will be increasing by $6 for DSL and $15 for cable, but the excess MB prices is dropping. Seems this is worse for cable, not DSL.

The 5GB and 10GB is staying the same except the excess MB charge is dropping. Seems this is good for everyone.

Seems like DSL is actually getting off pretty good here. Yes, they don't get the "full speed", but they get a price break at the lowest level, and the one service that is going up is going up less than cable. And all excess MB charges are going down for both services. Maybe it's because I'm not from Australia and don't know anything about Telstra, but this seems like a more toward being better, not worse.

It's business?

[wizman]

It's simple business. A broadband ISP has to actually MAKE money off of their customers. Upstream bandwidth is extremely expensive, and the residential market has been proven to hog bandwidth with p2p download services. There's no profit to be made when a customer consistently uses their 768k dsl or cable pipe and pays $39/month (US) for it. Broadband ISP's have to rely on the idea that only a part of those resi customers will chug bandwidth, and the less demanding users will "buffer" the effect. But, the fact seems to be that broadband users are bandwidth hungry. Businesses pay more and use less, and are glad that they have a fast and reliable connection. Residential customers, in my "wireless isp operating" experience, complain that we charge $69.95/month for a 512k package, complain that they don't get a /29 with that, complain that they have to buy a bit of hardware, complain that for 5 minutes their mpg ping times went up slightly, and complain about anything possible. Business clients purchase the same package and are happy to have a reliable service and a knowledgeable staff behind it.

It's no wonder broadband providers are either a) priced more than the competition, b) staying away from residential markets, or c) failing.

Why we complain...

[cr0sh]

I can't comment on the issues in Austrailia, but I believe I know why we complain about rates going up, service going down, etc. In so many words:

We are spoiled.

I can't remember exactly when real home-based "broadband" began to be rolled out here in America on a large scale basis, I think it was around 1996 or so - all that we had at that time was, at best, 56K modems - if you were lucky, and had a good clean line - most people had only 28.8-33.6, and thought it was great...

But then the rollout began, and people loved it - then the .com boom also picked up steam. "Cheap bandwidth and "flashy" sites for all!" became the cry of the day. A lot of people upgraded from relatively flakey modems, to broadband - and quickly found that always-on broadband changed how they used their computers, and how it affected their lives. Online shopping grew, getting news off the net was better than the TV, sometimes even for local coverage, and finding movie times became that much easier.

Broadband is fast and cheap - and that has become the meme of today. Now, most of us know that broadband is anything but cheap - try getting a T-1 to your house someday - hell, try to get ISDN (I remember a time between 56K modems and broadband where a lot of people were trying to get ISDN, and the articles being written up about the pain it was to do this)! But the everyday "joe" doesn't. He (and really, all of us) are spoiled by the speed and the price.

It wasn't an incremental change (like from 9600 baud modems to 14.4 to 28.8, etc - a jump from 56kbps to 1.5mbps, and higher in some cases) - and now we are going to be forced to go back to something a little more reasonable - slower "broadband", if you want it to stay at a reasonable price.

We need to realize something though - and this is something the cable companies and DSL providers don't want you to realize.

First off, these businesses should tier the service - and allow the consumer to pick and choose what they want. Say, start off with an always-on 56kbps up/down line - allow the consumer to tier the up/down ratio depending on what they want to use the line for - browsing, serving, or a combo (and let the consumer run servers, or VPN, or whatnot - people WANT THIS, although most think of it as P2P). For those doing more serving than browsing, charge an amount on the bandwidth used on the upstream side after a flat amount (say 3 gig a month or something), let them use as much downstream bandwidth as they can (ok, up to a certain point, of course), but do something different if they uploading data. But allow the user to serve this data - just make them pay for it.

This is similar in scope to a combo DSL and T-x service (and ISDN) work, on the billing side. DSL allows you (but not without a fine granualarity, from most providers) to change the tier of service depending on what you want to pay, and T-x/ISDN charges for bandwidth, etc used (also, they allow finer control on tiering).

Let the consumer choose his bandwidth needs (like he chooses his telephone needs), and let him use the line how he chooses (within reasonable limits, but don't stop him from running servers, etc completely). If this were to happen, the sting of going from "unlimited" bandwidth to whatever would be much less, I believe, because the user would see what he is gaining.

However, I don't believe this will ever occur, because the main broadband providers don't want the average joe to be able to serve content, as that would compete with their services (in whatever twisted sense they think of it).

Re:why is Slashdot so interested in DownUnder?

[4of12]

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?

Good time to announce this - 4 day ADSL outage

[Nailer]

lon32, a router in Telstra's Lonsdale St exchange in Victoria which these days handles ADSL connection has been down, according to Telstra's 1800 support number, for for days leaving a few hundred business ADSL uusers without connectivity for 95% of the time since Friday morning (its Tuesday Morning now). The Service Status page doesn't acknowledge this particular outage (though it does acknowledge three others).

I work for a IT Services customer and its worth noting the amount of problems customers who use ADSL ISPs with Telstra as their upstream provider have in comparison to others, particularly ISPs reselling RequestDSL (eg, BRD) or NC/Alternet (Netspace).

I'm no lawyer, but I know if someone wants to launch mass legal action against Telstra for this kind of shit then quite a few customers would be interested.