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Death of Decent Australian Broadband
iamplasma writes: "As reported by several Australian newspapers, Optus cable internet services will be switching their standard plan to a 3gb "soft-limit" broadband service (once the limit is passed, the service slows to 28kbps). This is effectively the end of decent broadband in Australia, with Optus being the only major provider to offer a service without a highly restrictive usage cap. This is also the ISP who proudly promoted themselves over their main competitor specifically over the issue of the competitor's 3gb limits."
See the site of the Australian Broadband Community - http://www.whirlpool.net.au/
So suck down that data while you still can
This may apply for ISP's outside the US getting service from major backbone providers of which most if not all are based in the US, and are charged by the amount of data they use.
However inside the US, ISP's pretty much pay flat fees from backbone providers, and in alot of cases, ISPs have peering agreements with each other, so source and destination traffic stays within the respective source and destination networks.
However once you have to cross the ocean, your being charge by the amount of data (whether undersea lines or satellite). The problem is, the US providers don't bear any of the costs, whether its someone in the US sending data to an ISP outside the US, or that ISP sending data to the US, that ISP bears ALL the costs
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Well ... they *could* be traffic-shaping at the LS-1010. Just a thought.
~N~
1. 550Mb/Month $AU64.95
2. 3Gb/Month $AU79.95
3. 5Gb/Month $AU164.95
4. 10Gb/Month $AU305.95
The average user, according to Optus, uses around 65Mb per day (or almost 2Gb/Month). The 3Gb plan could therefore be construed as offering 50% more than the current average usage.
For comparison, the plan I am currently on is $AU74.95/Month (incl GST) for up to ten times the average monthly usage, or 19.5Gb.
So, time to start hunting for alternatives. Oh, and ways to monitor my usage.
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
They are. When OptusNet aquired the optus@home business after the partnership died, they upgraded the solaris based system to one centered around Linux.
3GB is NOTHING. Your average webpage is around 100K. You use about 50M for an hour of gaming. The streaming video that features prominantly in almost every broadband commercial will take much more than that. Game demos, streaming music, all of the reasons to use broadband.
Telstra provides a number of unmetered sites for their 3GB capped users, including gaming servers, game demo downloads, 24 hour video music (thebasement.com.au), even the latest Linux and Free/Net/OpenBSD distros are available for unmetered download.
If Optus are not planning a similar system, I would be looking at switching to GASP Telstra for my broadband service. Sounds like they offer for free just what you want from broadband.
By the way, I too was pissed when Telstra introduced the 3GB limit, but I find by using the free sites on offer, especially GameArena (for my Linux downloads) I have no problem staying under the limit.
rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb...
This is all very off-topic, but I'm bored anyway, so I post as anonymous. From dict,
Optical Carrier 3
(OC-3) A {SONET} rate of 3 * 51.84 = 155.52 {megabits} per second, which matches {STS-3}.
No multiplier by 3 is necessary. One OC unit is 51.84 Mbps, or 6,794,772 Bps. This is what I divided by.
Does anybody know the difference between GB and Gb? Here's a hint...one is bit and the other is byte. If the article is posted correctly then it would seem that they have capped their users at a total of 384 megabytes of downstream per month, not even enough to download a single Linux ISO. Why is it that I get the impression that they're actually talking about gigabytes instead of gigabits, even though the original poster and the Slashdot editor can't tell the difference?
Maybe they could get a job at NASA converting meters to yards.
Optus was never going to be a viable competitor to Telstra. The Australian broadband industry is being held by the balls at the whim of this one company.
v e.gif) wasn't a soul-less ex-banker, we could have cheap unlimited broadband in Australia. Yet, if you study his strategy and read his speeches through the years, his plan is to get Telstra the brand into every aspect of Australian life. The company whose example he cited in his plans was AOL, and if you look at the directions they have been taking, a clear picture can be seen. Telstra have blamed their introduction of a 3GB cap (upload and download inclusive) on the 'fact' that overseas data is too expensive and due to leechers, those people who buy broadband but don't continue using it like a dialup connection. Interestingly, Telstra own 90% of the fibre and copper wire infrastructure in Australia but have also included local data transfer into the 3GB as well - *except* (And here's the good part) when using Telstra's own web portal www.bigpond.com. You can download as much music and reviews, streaming video, game demos and files, news, and other amazing content as you want without being charged to the quota. Yes ladies and gentlement, they are succeeding where AOL has failed. Telstra's aim is to cordone off the entire Australian Internet population into their own Intranet, like a herd of sheep, and all is going to plan. Now that the artificial bottlenecks have been put in place and we have been charged to buggery out of accessing the global part of the Internet (US8 cents per megabyte if you go over the 3GB), the shackles are popped on and we're *free* to roam around in captivity.
Telstra is a telecommunications company that happens to be the largest company in Australia. It was created by the government as a public utility by from the public purse in the early 1900's. Through the 20th century, the Australian public paid for all of its infrastructure development many times over.
If the CEO of Telstra (Ziggy - http://members.ozemail.com.au/%7Eisherwood/fugiti
The only way for this situation to get better is if the government (who still owns 51% of Telstra), make a decision to split the company into service and infrastructure, then keep the infrastructure publicly owned (just like the road system). Only then are we going to see competition in Australian broadband, and only then will we find freedom.
In the wholesale marketplace, ISPs have tended to use Telstra Megalink for 2 Mbps services (basically E1 on G.703), but that's increasingly being replaced by 100 Mbps Ethernet as next-generation carriers lay more fibre around the place.
Yes, you'd be right in thinking that all these connectivity options are very Telstra-centric. They're the monopology carrier in our, ahem, "competitive" telecommunications marketplace. It sucks, but it's one of the industry conditions which we just have to cope with, and it's one of the single largest reasons for the high cents/Mbyte figure you see quoted by retail ISPs in Australia. Just to give you some starting points, a Telstra Megalink in the 6km distance band costs $3000 to install and $800 per month to run. 64k on ISDN costs about $400 per month (if you've told Telstra which number you'll be dialling in advance - if you dial any other number, it's about $1800 per month in the local call charging band).
- mark
Network Engineer, Internode
-----
I tried an internal modem, but it hurt when I walked.
Of course there isn't any such thing as a T-1 in Australia; however, there is an E-1 (the European equivalent; 2 megabits, IIRC).
.15/Mb because connect.com.au started per-meg pricing about five years ago, and at the time the majority of Australian ISPs got connectivity through them [disclaimer: I am a former (disgruntled) employee of connect].
Most providers in Australia charge around
Later, when connect dropped their own overseas links and got a 100Mb pipe to Telstra because Telstra was beating them at their own game, a number of the ISPs switched, but by that time the pattern had been set; all of the first-tier providers were doing usage-based pricing.
Mark is modestly neglecting to mention that the company he works for is at the forefront of the fight to get a better deal from Tel$tra, and is one of the good guys. Internode (the company in question) do provide adsl, but like everyone else, they have to rent their bandwidth from Tel$tra, who charges them stupidly high prices to discourage competition. Yes, this is illegal, and the local Competion watchdog have taken Tel$tra to task for this. Unfortunately, this hasn't really changed things much.
(Unabashed praise from satisfied user follows...) Unlike a lot of ISPs, Internode has a high percentage of geeks at most levels of their infrastructure, and do their best to provide for all users, not just the average (how many other ISPs do you know that have a FreeBSD section on their support pages?). The management of Internode also are quick to respond to online concerns - f'rinstance, there was a concern raised over their adsl Terms of Use a while back on an Australian tech site. Internode's manager responded personally, and the offending section was revised within hours of the initial news posting.
When I eventually decide I really do need adsl, I know who I'll be going through...
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