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The Australian Broadband Disaster
David Gerard writes "Monopolies are bad, mmmkay? Robert Clark of TelecomAsia discusses the disaster that is broadband in Australia - its 2% takeup putting Australia behind such dynamic economies as Estonia. 'Telstra controls the local loop, is the largest mobile carrier with two digital networks, is the largest retail ISP, the largest wholesale data and Internet provider, and is a 50% shareholder in the biggest pay TV company.'"
For More Info on Australian broadband news you can go to http://whirlpool.net.au/ ----------- Off Topic I myself am having trouble with Ozemail aDSL. They say there is nothing wrong with my 1 - 3 second ping time (to ozemail.com.au) during peak times. They say if you can load a webpage in under 20 seconds nothing is wrong with it.
"You win again Gravity!" -Futurama (Zapp)
...than the comcast service I have right now. I swear my internet works only when no one on the block is watching cable.
I like their customer service "Welcome to Comcast, if you are calling for customer service please hang up now and bang your head against a wall until you are hallucinating connectivity.
I've heard that many (all?) of the Australian broadband options have limits on how much you can download per month. I hope it's not a sign of things to come in the rest of the world.
... they're anti-competitive too.
Read this post for an example. Basically they don't tell the other ISPs on their wholesalers list when new exchanges are ADSL-enabled, so that customers sign up with Telstra because they think they can't get a connection through other ISPs. (The author of that post, Simon Hackett, is the CEO of Internode, one of the larger - and best -- wholesale ISPs).
What is even more incredible than Telstras' monopoly in Australia is its plummeting share price. It has gone from around AU$8.50 in late 1999 to around AU$4.50 today. The monopoly and the resulting lack of cost efficient broadband would be easier to take if some people (especially all the Mums and Pops the government encouraged to invest when Telstra was privatised) had at least made some money out of it.
Over in New Zealand out monopoly is called Telecom NZ.
They have no bloody clue as well. Funny to see them them lose to Vodafone in the mobile phone market though.
I think the Southern Cross cable is just a myth and in this neck of the woods we connect to the US through "the message in a bottle method".
What is worse is that taxpayers own a majority stake in the company (in theory).
Telstra are the perfect example of why monopolies are bad.
They've taken every new technology that has come and instead of saying "How can we sell this to people and make a profit" they say "How can we exploit this and make as large a profit as we can."
I had ADSL with Telstra.
It was capped (bad) but I could live with that. Until they slammed me.
Short story:
I had the three gig cap. It cost $90 AUD/month for three gigs.
I went over one month (my bad) and used around 9 gigs (when I discovered file sharing). The bill I recieved however was for over $1200 AUD.
To sumamrise:
1st 3 gigs - Charge $90.
Each 3 gig block after that cost me $550 AUD.
At the time it was _not_possible_ to get a greater cap then 3 gigs - so if you wanted ten gigs to download that was what you paid.
Exploitation?
Yes.
They are scum and deserve to be broken up.
Estonia actually is a dynamic, hi-tech economy. They have the largest uptake of Internet banking in the world. When you park your car in Estonia, you pay the meter using your mobile phone. It is not surprising at all that they have a high uptake of DSL.
Both ex-British colonies, parlimentary systems (big ramifications there when passing legislation - like a benevolant dictatorship), both have positive views towards monopolies (the Canadian government sets them up from time to time), and both are large countries with small populations spread over a diverse and challenging geography. In countries like Australia and Canada, the Internet is important (small towns in the middle of nowhere - lived once in a town of 600 people - no where to buy shoes, cloths, books - and 6 hours from the nearest town).
In BC, we have one phone provider for local calling (Telus). They are also a monopoly in Alberta, and operate in other provinces. They provide DSL, but the government makes them sublease network access to smaller ISPs (though the price is tied to Telus). And they have Shaw/Rogers Cable to compete with (cable broadband).
Despite their monopoly in the telephone and DSL market, I pay $65 CDN (about $45 US) for a 2.5 megabit line. I could pay $45 CDN/$32 US for a 1.5 megabit line. What keeps the costs down? Well, Telus has to share their bandwidth; small ISPs can sell DSL that sits on the Telus networks. Second, the cable Interet providers provide an alternative.
I'm guessing Australia has neither of these two alternatives, and thus they get f*cked by a nasty monopoly.
Well that server died pretty quick.
Could you guys please slashdot more AU servers as something has to be done.
I run a large community down under and I pump out on a ADSL 64Kb.
Yah broadcasting.
Just to make you feel worse, I've got 1.5Mbps/512Kbps ADSL (up/down) in Japan, and although I don't keep track of my bandwidth usage, I imagine I'd do somewhere around 1-3GB a day.
I pay about what you do.
You think Australia's broadband situation is bad, look at how farking stupid IT minister Richard Alston is. The inbred half-wit spent 4 million tax dollars on a website. Hmmm, maybe he should've outsourced it to an indian for 200 bucks.
Australia is a classic case of why monopolies in any industry should be avoided.
The most recent broadband fiasco here in Oz concerns itself with Telstra (who handle ALL submissions for ADSL in Australia regardless of ISP) deliberately telling competitor signups that they don't meet broadband exchange requirements, then signing them up under Telstra where they suddenly just scrape in.
Then you have the woeful bandwidth limitations (imposed mostly because Telstra controls the phone lines and resells bandwidth to every other ISP by the MB).
The ONLY point I will concede to Telstra is that due to our huge, continent scale country, upgrading ALL exchanges can be cost prohibitive, however to not have broadband capability yet in large POPULATED regions is unforgiveable in 2003.
In short, Telstra as a RETAIL company should be split from Telstra the NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE company. Make the infrastructure company publically owned, then Telstra (Retail) can compete along with everyone else on a level playing field.
Quizo
Visceral Psyche Films
...it provides heaps of motivation for
C
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Wireless Networks. And the government finds it pretty difficult to argue against them.
That's a Berlusconi waiting to happen...*shudder*.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I couldn't read the article as it's /.ed (mirrors anyone?)
But my perspective as a broadband user in Australia...
Frankly, I don't see there's a big problem. I pay my money (which as much as I can tell is roughly in keeping with global prices), and get a reasonably good, fast connection. Yes, almost all broadband providers have download caps (typically around 1 - 4Gb/month), but that's not a problem for most people, just leeches mostly.
If you use Telstra for your broadband, you might get lousy customer service (as I did before I switched) but now I'm with a smaller provider (Internode) and quite happy with them. Good connections, good service, reasonable prices.
Why the take up is so low, I don't know (maybe the article does), but I've got it, it wasn't hard and I'm happy.
FYI, I pay $A80/month for a semi-high end plan which is roughly $US55. Basic plans start around $A50 - 60/month, perhaps even lower.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
A senate committee hearing is currently underway in Australia, which is invistgating Telstraâ(TM)s practices. Especially Broadband and the dominance over the local loop. (Last mile of copper from the exchange)
6 08 0.pdf
Just take a look at the transcription below to get a feel for the attitude this company has!
http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/s
Comments like this from Telstra really make you laugh. (pg. 337)
There is an ADSL fetish that ADSL equals broadband. We do not believe that. We sell broadband services, and so we will try ISDN for those customers. That may be all they need, particularly if they are downloading stuff from the US, because ISDN is the maximum speed you will need to get stuff from the US.
Sad But true.
Area51 - We are watching...
the webserver seems to be grinding to a halt, so here's the article:
Australia's great broadband disaster
[by Robert Clark]
After a decade of political in-fighting over the ownership of Telstra, Australia faces the prospect of being a broadband desert. The incumbent needs to get out of cable TV - but first the government has to get out of denial
This is the story how a single mistake can turn into a multi-layered catastrophe. About how industry structure can drive government policy. About how the powerful will drive players in a market to their own ends. About how monopolies will thrive despite the most rigorous of regulators.
This then is the story of the great broadband disaster Down Under.
To a casual observer, it might seem an unlikely tale - Australia has been one of Asia's pioneers in telecom deregulation as well as in the adoption of new technology.
Australia introduced the first full service competition regime in the Asia-Pacific in 1992 and the first totally liberalized market in 1997. It boasts very respectable ownership rates for mobiles and PCs of around 70%, and around 60% for the Internet. It has far and away the strongest competition watchdog along with a well-resourced and experienced industry regulator. It has 600 ISPs, 80 long distance providers and four mobile operators, each of the latter with an international footprint.
As much as any other market in Asia-Pacific it has set the pace for telecom reform since the late 1980s.
Yet the story of Australian telecommunications in the decade since full competition began is that of a never-ending trench war between politicians, regulators, media magnates, new telcos and diverse groups ranging from farmers to pro-privatization lobbies.
More than anything else, they are arguing about the future of 50.1% government-owned Telstra - the country's biggest company, the most widely-held stock, the incumbent telco and the dominant cable company.
Yet amid the political thrust and parry, few have noticed that the industry structure has since lost the ability to deliver competitive outcomes.
No alternative
One long-standing Telstra critic is Professor Alan Fels, chairman of the national competition regulator the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), who describes Telstra as one of the world's "most horizontally and vertically integrated telecommunications companies."
It is Fels who points out that Telstra controls the local loop, is the largest mobile carrier with two digital networks, is the largest retail ISP, the largest wholesale data and Internet provider, and is a 50% shareholder in the biggest pay TV company.
And, almost uniquely in the world, it has been allowed to build a hybrid fiber coax (HFC) cable network which has been leased all but exclusively to its own pay TV company, a joint venture with the country's two most powerful media tycoons, Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer.
"In the local call services market competition has had very little impact," Fels says, adding that Telstra's competitors have virtually no alternative but to use the incumbent's network - even the main rival, Optus, relies heavily on the Telstra local loop.
"The clear message from this analysis is that Telstra has overwhelming dominance across the telecommunications market and in almost every segment of that market," Fels told an industry event in early March.
The impact of Telstra's sway in the market shows up most clearly in what has become the most critical aspect of the "last mile" - the growth of broadband.
The figures tell the story. With less than 2% of the population using a broadband connection, Australia now ranks 23rd on the global league table of broadband connectivity, behind 18 OECD countries as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Estonia. And it is sinking.
Ewan Sutherland, chief executive of the International Telecommunications Users' Group (INTUG), says that even if Telstra meets its target of 1 mil
@ASP.NET's parent-teacher meeting: "Little Johnny.NET is very bright, but he doesn't play well with others."
I've never seen an ISP in Canada that is unlimited, they all cap the bandwidth and charge unbelievably high prices.
yeah - same with me. I keep broadband now only because it allows me to be on the net while i use the phone - it is cheaper than maintaining 2 phone lines and thus still OK value.
I'm with optus@home, I can't wait to get rid of these rip off merchants, check out their plans -
Lite 550MB $64.95
Standard 3GB $79.95
Pro 5GB $154.95
Ultimate 10GB $305.95
I'm on the Standard 3GB a month for $80AUD - and btw, if you go over the 3GB your cable modem gets throttled down to 28.8kbps! Besides that, if I wanted to go for 5GB a month then that will be $155AUD! WTF is that! an extra 2GB a month and an increase of $70?!
Indeed it is a crisis, and iirc Microsoft warned about the crisis a few years ago, the article was on slashdot.
Don't worry, the country here is run by a bunch of cattle herding farmers who are afraid of technology and large populations. There won't be any incentive to fix the broadband price infrastructure for some time as they believe the internet is a latest craze like the hoola-hoop and yo-yo.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Canberra is in the process of becomming the first Australian city to be fully set up for cable (it's due to Canberra's quirks that this is possible), so much of Canberra can already dump Telstra totally and use Transact (www.transact.com.au) for all phone calls + TV + broadband internet and the rest is due in a couple of years. However, we still have to pay way to much for downloads as Australia seems to get screwed for international traffic irrespective of the ISP. Local traffic on Transact is free though so we just need people to set up more mirrors here in Canberra!
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Australia's big telcos (mostly Telstra) have long argued that the way they charge for extra downloads and uploads are not a problem for most broadband users... then today, their telecommunications watchdog announces that broadband complaints have skyrocketed, and most seem to be about the data charges...
This login session: $13.99
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
yes indeed! check out www.plusdial.net they are doing mobile ticketing for concerts, parking etc.
... just think they are doing cool stuff ...
btw, i don't work for 'em
The most ridiculous thing isn't the fact that we have 3gb/month limits, but the fact that to upgrade to a 5gb/month plan, you have to pay almost as much as two 3gb connections!
It's completely ludicrous, driven mainly by the fact that our technology minister is a luddite who went on the record to say that broadband internet is only useful for porn and games.
.. ie that it can be regulated to offers good price and service.
;-)
For some times, here in france FT had a monopoly for the last kilometer link.
This shows that the DSL deployement was not so quick mainly because of the price
Now, that the last KM has been deregulated, the DSL market is booming : +100% on one year !
Some of the ISP use the provider services from FranceTelecom, other have their own core service. We even have some bank now offering DSL services (operated by third party ISP) ! OF course the most interrested thing is the price: 30â for a 1Mb no-limit DSL . And this is constantly decreasing as more as the deregulation is gaining momentum....
Ausis, put the pressure on your gov & telcos !
It worth wasting your time, to get better connectivity
-SLK
I'm a politically observant citizen of .au and can't place this quote - maybe its the beer at lunch - but which former PM said that?
I have noticed a huge surgence of "capless" broadband plans in recent months.
Many ISP's including Dodo, escape net, TPG to name just a few have introduced unlimited download plans on their "slow" 256K/64K plans. This is fantastic news for home users except for those that have been locked into an 18 month contract with Telstra and are still capped at 3GB.
Incidently, though Australia's broadband usage is only 2% Nationally - it is actually increasing exponentially. Total number of ADSL/Cable users increased from 15,000 in July 2001 to almost 60,000 in June 2002 and it is still increasing rapidly. (See the ACCC)
Though growth may have slowed recently a little due to general unhappiness with Telstra's monopoly and bandwidth caps I see the influx of new ISP's and uncapped plans (thanks to comindico) as a good sign of more growth to come.
I have 10 Mbps/10 Mbps uncapped for $36/month here in Sweden. I do somewhere around 10 GB a day...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
The Telstra/Optus duopoly makes it impossible for smaller players to compete. I work for an MVNO, a smaller mobile phone network that effectively piggybacks the Optus GSM network. (Optus have their own mobile products so we are effectively partnering and competing at the same time -- what's wrong with this picture?)
Every time we offer a reasonably priced mobile plan that offers the consumer good value for money, both Optus AND telstra drop their pants, offering ludicrously underpriced products that we can't compete with. These cashed up bohemoths can afford to lose money to gain subscribers. We can't.
To try and understand why broadband access within Australia has only 2% take up, look at The sad fact is most of the cost in these plans is in the Telstra wholesale charges. Often accounting for 80% cost of the product, which mid you, doesn't include data. So the ISP has absolutely no room to move! Almost all of all the ADSL providers in Australia resell Telstra ADSL. There's no competition at the whoelsale level at all. Until we see some real competition in the broadband whole market, the prices will remain the same.
Area51 - We are watching...
There's so much wrong with your short post. Gook was used in connection with Vietnamese, never Japanese and malodorous is one word. Besides, everyone knows that only Koreans eat cats.
Cheers!
GNU/Wolfgang
Why thank you Mr. States the obvious!
"Dial-up Internet services are still well-appreciated,"
- Perhaps because the broadband is so pathetic it makes dial up look like the holy grail! I know when I lived in Australia I used a flat rate dial up plan over broadband because I couldn't even get it. Even if I could get it, I wouldn't because the quality is so poor and so expensive.
Ugly Bob
To Live Is To Die.
just as bad in new zealand if you go over your cap, but you don't get shafted quite to the tune of A$90, its more like NZ$65 for a 5 gig cap, go the Telecom monopoly. Funny thing is that in selected cities TelstraClear (telstras nz outfit) offer a cable service that craps allover adsl for much less $$ than telecom
^Z
[1]+ Stopped
IT policy in Australia is a national disgrace and will continue to be as long as Richard Alston is in charge. He has been dubbed Senator "Luddite" by The Register. Gross stupidity withstanding, everything he does is clearly to benefit one person: Richard Alston. I know someone who stood next to him in a photo shoot recently and she said Senator Alston spent about 30 minutes getting makeup done before the picture was taken. She also said his perfume (sorry cologne) stinks.
His website reflects his self-aggrandizing nature. Notice how Senator Luddite's name is plastered all over the website taking credit for his staffers work like this report on spam
His latest disaster was revealed in parliament recently when it was revealed that he spent $4 million dollars on his departments website. When the scandal broke, the press went around and received quotes from web shops for roughly $65000 for the exact same job. Have a look yourself. There are multiple javascript errors on the home page apparently. I'm not suprised. I've corresponded with this department and many of the staffers have problems receiving/sending email. It's a joke that this office should be setting IT policy in Australia
The Australian monopoly Telstra is supposed share their bandwidth too - they provide many base exchange services for smaller ISPs, and usually the uplink as well.
The problem is that all of the smaller ISPs are therefore dependant on Telstra's goodwill & timeliness. If Telstra "forget" to give the ISPs up-to-date information, or give their own ISP arm service priority, there's little the smaller ISPs can do.
You may not have to use ADSL - cable is an option for some (through Telstra). Optus are another major telco who provide local calls and broadband, through their own cable, though their market share is considerably less than Telstra's. Unfortunately, few areas have both Telstra and Optus cable available, so there's little actual competition between them. And only a relatively small % of the population can get cable at all, so ADSL is the only option for many, which means you're dependant on Telstra again.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
That's nothing...
While dictating whatever price it wants to consumers certainly fits under the umbrella of monopolistic and confiscatory behavior (OK, behaviour) it's still not as stifling as a monopoly that has enough influence in government to kill off its competition by obtaining preferential legislation.
Now THAT kind of monopoly is hard to get rid of. If Telstra does that as well, then my apologies and consolations.
I don't know about the US but .au has no value broadband isp's at all. Telstra is the mother of all screwups. Dare I say, more hated than AOL?
a ns /
http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/access/ADSL/pl
Just check out the pricing plans. Don't forget to convert the $$$ from AU to US www.xe.com
Telstra have more downtime than uptime and have a complete disregard for their customers. Australia spits on them *spitting sound*!
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
Keating - that was back when we had a leader who led, not like Howard who just mumbles and wishes we were back in the 50's.
This is a company that also limits the bandwidth available to customers through specific ports (think P2P). It doesn't matter that the customer has paid for the connection - they still tell (force?) you to use it as they want.
Prices for data? 128kb/s ADSL with 5GB monthly cap - NZ$65
up to 8Mb/s (usually around 2MB/s) ADSL (home) 500MB per month $49 1GB per month $69
up to 8MB/s (usually around 2MB/s) ADSL (home or business)
600MB - $62
1200MB - $120
1800MB - $176
3000MB - $292
5000MB - $458
10000MB - $888
20000MB - $1800
These are NZ$ (multiply by .6 to get $US equivalent) plus 12.5 % sales tax, and ISP fees, as this is just for the data flowing over Telecom's network.
The Mothership
Oh that's right! you have to live in a city here to get an decent 'modern' services. Can't wait til we get electricity, but.
signature placeholder for rent.
This needs to be fixed, so that I no longer have to spend 8 hours downloading classic episodes of Bananas in Pajamas from slow Australian Kazaa servers. :P
Compare population density ... Estonia is small
and with much higher population density.
Not mentioning that they have very close
ties to Finland that is one of the most
wired coutries in the world.
Actually, you can get fixed-rate ADSL from quite a few provides - see Whirlpool for a list. Most will slow you down to modem speeds past the cap point, but at least you don't get whacked with thousand-dollar service bills.
Still, you can get ""unlimited" ADSL plans for as little as $65, e.g. from TPG. Only 256/64 Kb/s, and it can get pretty choked at peak times. It does exist, but it's a far, far cry from the unlimited cable I enjoyed in Canada for $40/month...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
what im worried about is what we will do when xbox live comes out over here. if its 100 aud for the xbox live starter kit and 50 - 80 $ amonth just for broad band..... i hope MS starts their own broad band company over here and can offer cheap broad band accounts for xbox owners...
i guess i can dream...
Not that I think they're much different from a lot of politicians around the world. :)
From the article:
--
Simon
Sure. A decade. Say - what was the Korean broadband penetration in 1993?
Here, they rejected one customer applying through iiNet, a smaller ISP, claiming line quality was insufficient. The customer applied again through Telstra's own ISP, and was accepted. His ADSL service worked perfectly.
He complained to the Telecommunications Ombudsman publicised this, and shortly afterwards received an offer from Telstra to refund his connection fee, provide discounted service & upgrade his link too. He accepted, and also publicised Telstra's offer, causing more controversy. Telstra's explanation for the original problem was that "line test quality tests varied according to the weather".
Shortly after that, he was notified by Telstra that his service was to be disconnected, as he was "too far from the exchange". His ADSL service was still working perfectly, but apparently he shouldn't have been connected at all, regardless of the line quality...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Just thought you should know.
There are quite a few plans in Australia where you can pay around the same price (sometimes less) as optus/telstra for the 3 Gig cable plan for an unlimited ADSL connection (512/64). So it's not all bad.
Yeh I'm going to be getting broadband shortly too. As quoted in an earlier post, it costs almost double the 3gb plan to get 5gb (instead of decreasing as you would expect with economies of scale).
The only options for me with cable are either Optus or Telstra. And one thing not mentioned by other poster's are that if you want to get cable internet in an apartment, you general *cant* get telstra (their policy it appears is to not support apartment blocks), so you have to go with optus.
So yes, I will also be bending over to get cable from Telstra for exorbitant prices. I cannot wait until we get some competition.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Well, over here in New Zealand, it's very similar -
All ADSL broadband is provided through the largest (ex-SOE) government-supported monopoly of a telecommunications company (Telecom). They charge the most ridiculous prices for ADSL and even mislead customers with the speed of the actual service (in a very cunning, but legal, way).
Yep, me too: real Ethernet to the home box. And now two companies here in Sweden are battling with VDSL offers: one with 10Mb/10Mb for about $35,and the other claims to offer up to 23Mb for about the same price! And our former monopoly Telia have no plans to do anything at this point.... on the contrary, they had plans to cap the traffic, or charge by the Mb, which no other company does here :D (not that I know of, anyway)
Meep.
Broadband is simply too expensive here in Australia for the majority of customers - that's why the takeup rate is so slow.
While living in Canada for the last 4 years, for about CDN$40/month (about AU$48/month, including the modem rental) I enjoyed unlimited high-speed cable internet. But when I moved back to Australia, I found that cable internet would cost about AU$65/month, plus the cost of the modem ($300 I think), with a 3 GB cap (including both uploaded and downloaded data). Any traffic beyond that was ~14c/MB. This was a lot better than before I left Australia 4 years ago ($65/month, $500 modem, 100 MB cap (yes, MB) and 33c/MB beyond that!), but still a big let down.
I ended up with a third-party (Internode) ADSL link at only 512/128 Kb/s for $99/month (and a $200 modem) which is uncapped, but prioritises me down the more I download (upload is unmetered).
I'm told the Canadian government ensures that broadband prices are kept at reasonable levels. The Australian government certainly doesn't. I was also told that Australia must pay for all traffic both to and from the US. 4 years ago, this was apparently about 12c/MB, and was the justification for the traffic caps and excess charges.However, these traffic charges are not only passed on to the consumer, they are also apply to everything - even Australian sites, and even if the content is cached by a local web proxy. Certain "popular" files may be mirrored for free by the ISP, if you're lucky.
It's not hard to see why Australian broadband costs so much, and why so few people can afford it.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I started using Telstra ADSL back before they started capping the bandwidth, and all I can say they are absolute shit.
When ringing them when the net is down, I had to wait at least 20 minutes before I got through, and when I did, they wouldn't help me because I wasn't using Windows, their USB-to-Ethernet converter, and my computer was plugged into a network. When I finally had reverted my network back to whatever they wanted, they finally started helping me, and the problem was on their end, as I already knew. Usually it takes around a day before it starts working again, and that's nowhere near satisfactory.
After endless hours of surfing, I found iiNet, a Perth-based ISP that offered 512/128, 6gb on peak and 6gb off peak for $79.95 AUD. Which was much better than the $100 we were paying for unrealiable 3gb. And if you go past the limit, you get 'shaped' to 72kbits, which is good enough for surfing. Plus, they have an extensive peering network, PIPE Networks, which include a large amount of ISPs and FTPs to grab latest trailers, etc., off.
But wait! There's more! iiNet has an unique way of counting your bandwidth limit. It adds up the last 30 days of usage, and if it goes over your limit, it starts shaping the next day. That means if you manage your download effectively, you can squeeze in 12gb of downloads easily. Only downside to iiNet, however, is you have to pay in blocks of three months.
Otherwise, iiNet is a great ISP to look at if you wanna get of Telstra.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
Do you have 1 - 3 second pings when you're doing nothing, absolutely nothing, on your link except a ping?
If so - yeah, something is FUBAR. Consider a traceroute to watch where the holdup actually it. It's quite likely a Telstra problem (remember, your ADSL is mostly Telstra no matter who you sign up with).
Here's what I see:
From their ISDN site: http://www.telstra.com.au/isdn/res.htm
I'm sick of the Internet tying up my phone line. I'm not getting my normal calls. Isn't there a better way?
ISDN Home effectively provides you with (2) digital channels (2x64Kbps) or the equivalent of (2) phone lines - including an extra phone number. So you can make and receive calls on one line while you're connected to the Internet with the other - and you don't have to worry about missing any urgent calls.
My Internet access is unreliable and slow, especially in the early evening. Can I do better?
YES! ISDN Home provides guaranteed 64Kbps digital speed - significantly faster than a standard analogue modem connection anytime of the day or night. Less waiting for you while you download large files or software updates. And it's great for playing interactive games!
From a magazine ad for Telstra broadband a while back (in summary, anyway):
I felt like I'd lost direction in my life, so I used my TELSTRA BROADBAND connection to surf to a university site and find an interior design course! Now it's my life! Tee hee hee!
From the final page of an hour-long survey I did when attempting to leave Telstra BigPond Home:
Page Not Found
Fuckers. Hate hate hate.
It does seem though that until the T&C's are relaxed these companies won't reach the critical mass to make profit. Maybe the telcos should look at making the investment to expand their pipes. People would jump on board and I'm sure the investment would pay for itself many times over, and almost simultaneously with the upgradees.
This is especially relevant for a nationalised company (not sure if the ISP in the article is), the country would realise the benefits in increased productivity etc.....
Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
4 years ago, I got cable internet within a few months of its initial availability in Sydney, and it was capped, believe me.
For $65/month, I was capped at a mere 100 MB, including both upload and download. Excess bandwidth was 33c/MB! Imagine what downloading a "free" RedHat ISO cost.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The RIAA is just another NAZI organization creating a vortex of doubts and using the law for its own criminal purposes. To extort money from defensless students. Why not invest all that money into embracing a new form of internet marketing such as P2P? These intimidating techniques and the reasons (as given by the RIAA) for their execution are a vivid example of a neo gestapo organization bent into sodomizing the poor consumer. Doesn't the freaking music industry already have enough money? And they want more? Damn Nazis
Funny how I actually wrote about this previously too: ---------------- Australian Isp's In case you haven't established this yet, Optus and Telstra are monopolising the AUS internet market, you cant host servers on them, regardless of whether your downloading off their proxies, the traffic is included in your downloads. Only things they dont include in downloads are ARP packets, and thats only because they cant monitor stuff that low level. I bet even running this freenet node is a crime, even though only 3 gigs of downloads are permitted a month. It means that technically its legal for me to run this freenet node as a transient node, but not as a permanent node. Oh, and optus has free uploads, so ABUSE IT .. Upload as much to other servers as you can, its not included in your downloads.
One recommendation I suggest is to constantly hammer Optus and telstra with requests to at the very least, dont include traffic in the downloads that was downloaded off the ISP's proxies, or any traffic between two optus customers. Traffic like this costs Optus and Telstra NOTHING. Remember, it actually costs Optus and telstra alot to handle technical support.. if you request this stuff enough, it will be cheaper for them to just do it. Its too bad that the optus rules are so ambiguous that even sending a file over MSN could be considered a crime, and since optus doesn't host any game servers, which means they cant technically there shouldn't be any servers on optus, which means technically all gamers should have alot of lag. But they wont enforce that rule because the moment they do, they lose stacks of customers... SO WHY NOT JUST CHANGE THE RULE???
Hammer your councils for a free community Wireless network.. Cheap to set up, and beneficial for industry, businesses, and people alike, at barely any cost to the council.
Making your downloads more efficient
Since the people at the ISP's charge for traffic regardless of whether it costs them anything or not, the easiest way to do this is increase the disk cache on your browsers to much bigger then 60 megs.
The best way however, is to infact set up your own caching proxy (set up in transparant mode) and caching DNS server, especially if you have multiple computers on your network. If you have an old computer lying around, check out Mandrake MNF (mandrake Multi network firewall) www.mandrake.com.. Its easy to configure a proxy and caching DNS, and set up NAT (network address translation). Remember that you will probably need to hook up your cable modem ON A SEPERATE NETWORK CARD FROM YOUR ACTUAL NETWORK, using a crossover RJ45 cable, and when you change the network card your modem is on, you need to pull the cable of the modem out and put it back in. With a Caching proxy and caching DNS server, the 3kb/s cap after you exceed your downloads on Optus is less noticeable for browsing, and is only really visible when downloading files.
----
hammer the councils to set up community wifi networks ;)
Um, no. I want broadband because it's FASTER than 56k, period. It's called improvement, not piracy. I really am sick of waiting 5 minutes to load a page with five banner ads, and a flash ad embedded, or ten minutes just to load up some cheesy game on newgrounds.com, or mayhap I am just sick of my 300+ ping while playing UT2k3 /CS /Quake3 /Evercrack /whateverelseIwantoplay.
Right now I'm in the process of shopping for broadband, because i just moved to a new apartment with crappy speeds, I can only connect in dialup up to 26400, and sometimes as low as 19200, while paying Erfwink, the worlds LEAST reliable ISP 21.00 a month, for speeds that I was sick of in the mid 90's.
Sure I *CAN* pirate more warez with a nice 250/650k connection, or I could download a *GRIP* of pr0n, or just meet new people, and FRAG them.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Accurate Portrayal of Australian Broadband!
Here in South Africa, broadband has only been out since about March 2002, and it's already had way more than a 2% takeup, despite being relatively expensive (ZAR700 per month, or US$80 per month, for a 512K ADSL line) compared to other broadband-utilizing countries.
Considering the fact that Australia is a more advanced country than South Africa, it seems to me that, judging by the Australian broadband fiasco, and the various Internet censorship fiascos that raged in Australia a while ago, Australia's current administration is trying to impede technological progress in Australia.
We hang the petty thieves, but appoint the great ones to public office. - Aesop
...only we call it TelefÃnica
IMHO it is not lawful to charge more than twice for twice the amount.
This is screwing with people. period.
--- Eat my sig.
Telstra suffers from a disease that is quite common ammong companies who have a monopoly: imcompetence. For instance, we tried to solve why our australian branch could not make an isdn connection to Amsterdam. Turned out that telstra simply forgot to route to Holland..
Are the are local loop alternatives like wireless. For example in london there is consume.net where people are clubbing together to make a local mesh
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
...it`s Telenor
"If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
Spider Jerusalem
Your quota is measured as the maximum of traffic in and out, which is fairly common. Some ISPs ignore traffic from you and only charge for traffic to you.
For comparison, Telstra charge you up to 19c/megabyte (here 12-16c) for the combined sum of all traffic both directions, and iiNet (biggest ISP in West Aus, second would be WestNet) soft-limit all home accounts (limits are 6GB for AUD$79.95 512kb a/c or 0.5GB for AUD$49.95 128kb a/c) and charge 12c/MB on business excess.
ALL DSL goes through Telstra DSLAMs except on a very few busy exchanges Optus and/or Request have their own DSLAMs. This causes no end of problems for competing ISPs because they have to phone up and ask Telstra to do a "tunnel reset" when someone's DSL screws up, which often takes a day or two to execute.
Note in the Telstra DSL plans avobe that their entry level plan is AUD$10/mo more expensive, and a 512kb plan with only 3GB limit (sum of both directions, remember?) and a max of two users - the cheek! - is $18/month more than I pay ArachNet.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I got billed $800 on a Dial-Up account because I went over their "Unlimited" 500 meg limit.
Then I switched to IPrimus, who, for dial-up anyway, are pretty decent, I mean they let me get away with this which is nice for the most part.
The end result of this is now I don't have anything to do with telstra whatsoever, my phoneline is through someone else, my internet is through someone else, the only thing I do use them for is when their wires fail to work and I need them repaired. In the city at least they fix these problems.
Read Errant Story.
One issue I want to raise is the TOS (Terms of Service) Contracts you sign when connecting to a Plan. I have yet to see a TOS agreement that does not include a clause that says :
We reserve the right to make amendments and or changes to this agreement at anytime in the future.
I donâ(TM)t know the exact wording but the jest of it is that they can cap your download, change your charge/MB, change your connection speed, and other little conditions. You are bound by these changes because you signed a contract saying you accepted any future changes. It is ridiculous.
These kinds of agreements are not only found in ADSL contracts but in mobile phone contracts, some software contracts and I imagine any other service, which has ongoing charges.
One example is when I signed up for $10/month dial up account, if I payed a year in advance. 3 months in, they capped my downloads. If I had known they would implement this condition I would not have signed up in the first place.
Until customers can trust the companies they sign up with to not do sneaky tricks to get more $$$ out of you, I donâ(TM)t blame Australian for not taking up Broad Band. They are probably all scared that Telstra will add a clause saying you have to hand over your first born child.
I once made the mistake of trying out the then-new BitTorrent protocol to download an ISO, while staying at a friend's place. He was (but no longer is) connected to Telstra.
I didn't give much thought to BitTorrent's uploading while downloading, other than thinking it was a good idea, nor did I realise that my friend's data cap included upload bandwidth..
A day later, my friend got around to checking his email, and found a series of messages warning him that he was over his cap, and that charges were accumulating at 14c/MB. I consider myself lucky that, despite my carelessness, I escaped with a mere $110 of excess bandwidth fees... (Mark, when are you going to let me pay you back? ;-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I can't believe all these ridiculous figures I'm reading from users in Oz, didn't anybody think of shopping around?
I'm with a smaller I.S.P. for my broadband here in Western Australia and the plans speak for themselves - reasonable monthly fees for realistic traffic levels (given the costs imposed on the I.S.P. by the carriers) - all a bloody sight better than what I'm reading for Telstra and Optus.
Monthly excess can either be charged or a soft cap imposed - but still at higher speeds than dial-up. The other good part of the smaller I.S.P. is you don't get the "customer rep." if you have to phone for tech. support, you get the guys who run the place and can solve the problems without having to R.T.F.M!
Anyone who goes with the big guys down here is a mug - shop around, ask around or just plain Google it, there's plenty of good deals out there to be had.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
To be honest, how can you compare Australia vs Estonia? There are only 17.5 million people in Australia, a better comparisson would be Australia vs SriLanka, and even then we see better broadband distrubtion in SriLanka (war ravaged) vs in Howard's Australia.
Back home in Australia I used Optus cable on the 3gb home plan which was a nice fee to pay and bumped by internet to 28.8k once I passed the limit. I have now moved to Utah and am using Comcast. My experience with Optus was not perfect...but Comcast also has its disadvantages. Total throughput is lower (at 4am in the morning) but ping rates are much lower than in Australia to local servers. Comcast's price is also half as much as Optus and has no cap. Personally I am happy with Comcast's service here in comparison to Optus. In Australia we were sure being ripped off.
Is those bloody Aussies practising sports so they can beat us (the British) yet again.
Now they've got cricket, tennis, swimming, rugby and even football sorted the next sport they seem to be having a bloody good try at Formula 1.
I think we're going to have to invent another sport so we can have at least a couple of years of winning the world championship in something..
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
In South Africa, exactly the same problem. Unitil recently there was a state owned monopoly, Telkom, which has just been privatised. They finally started offering ADSL last year with a download cap of about 3GB. After that there is no choice, you're get throttled down to 1k/s. On top of that all non-standard ports for internation traffic are capped. This costs about $80 US a month, and you have to have a Telkom normal landline for another about $10. Telkom itself imposes the cap so there's no point in changing ISPs, not that any ISP other than Telkom offers ADSL. The goverment is trying to license a second national operator for fixed lines at the moment, so maybe that'll help. Wireless is illegal for anybody but the 3 cell phone providers, so you can't even use that.
Telstra's run by pooftahs!
If you think broadband down under is a disaster, you should see our Digital TV situation.
Finland has ONE large high-tech company, Nokia...
This is often noted misconception. Nokia is huge in the finnish scale and it does indeed get most of the publicity around world, but it certainly is not the only hi-tech company in Finland.
The average Finnish hi-tech company is more like Salcomp, concentrated on the manufacturing and design. F-Secure, SSH Communications, Elcoteq... if these aren't high profile hi-tech companies then what is?
My korean friend would be offended that you missed as well. Gook is a term for koreans, not vietnamese.
NZ really only has one broadband option.
ADSL,put simply the plans are like this
128k up/down ADSL with a cap of between 5 and 12gb international data (internal NZ dont count)
or full speed ADSL with a 500 or 1000 mb cap.
its utter BS.
what i pay for 12gb of data, i could get at least 10mbit connection in sweeden.
life sux.
monopolys are bad.
Here in Tokyo, I've got a 10mbit connection for about $38 AUS dollars/month, And could switch to a 100mbit (cable) cxn for about ~$60 AUS dollars. No cap. I'd average 1 Gig a day download (more on weekends). So, if the costs you presented are correct, you'd be paying AUD $15,000/month for what I'm getting for AUD $38. And everyone here complains Japan is backward compared to countries like Sth Korea.
When they say takeup is 2%, does that assume 2% of the population, becasue that is not accurate.
.. So It has to be at least 6%....
Telstra is one of 2 main suppliers, and they have 300,000 consumer broadband connections (both wholesale and retail). At the Australian average of 2.7 people per household (Australian Census 1996)that is 810,000 people who have access to broadband at home.
Australia's population is 18.2Million (Australian Census 1996).
So Telstra is reaching approx 4.5% of the population with broadband (via wholesale or retail).
Now this is just Telstra, and doesn't include any Optus cable customers (at least 100k more?).
I hate bad statisticians who assume broadband accounts = number of people with access to broadband at home.
lounge around on the blue couch
I previously worked for the New Zealand arm of Telstra (TelstraClear), TelstraClear is wholly owned by Telstra and is the result of Telstra buying (and combining) Saturn Communications, Clear Communications and numerous smaller companies.
Before the Telstra purchase of these companies I regularly looked at Telstra position and the public perception of it, I was bewildered that the staff of a company could go along with something that was so obviously in direct contrast to their customers interests, I have since come to realise that they have option in their customer relations and are (basically) forced to provide an abysmal level of service.)
Telstra purchased the company I worked for and over time added others till we reached the behemoth that is now TelstraClear, I had a great view of our 'department' falling down the slippery slop and becoming part of what I've now found to be the "Telstra Way".
We went from being one of (if not the) most loved company in our field to receivng death threats from customers within roughly a two year period.
Almost everyone in my 'department' gave so much more than could ever be reasonably asked of them, they worked extremely long hours and like most parts of the company received no recognition for their efforts and no increase in pay.
We worked harder and harder finding that our efforts (in most cases) only resulted in slowing the process of 'decay'. Most departments in the company were downsized to the point that people had to quit due to overwork. This made things almost surreal, people quit over high workload but were not allowed to be replaced putting an even higher workload on the remaining staff.
Call Centre and Helpdesk staff were especially hard hit, with the customer base constantly growing (largely due to the previous reputations of the companies of which TelstraClear is comprised). There were (increasingly more frequent) instances of the multimillion dollar call centre software 'falling over' due to 'overflows' in the wait queues (the designers had never envisaged hundreds of people waiting in the inbound call queues).
This all comes down to the fact that TelstraClear is (as one of my co-workers excellently put it) "The most corprationary corporation".
We were constantly bombarded with brilliant catch phrases telling us to "Work Smarter, Not Harder" and that "There is no I in Team".
Amongst the pile of 'motivational' paperwork we received (loud and clear) the message that Telstra(Clear) had the main priority of looking good for its shareholders, this priority superseded everything, the general concept of a corporation is a very dangerous thing.
Telstra and TelstraClear (Being the same company anyway) have demonstrated over time like many companies their primary goal is profit, but unlike other companies there is no 'give and take', they will go after the quickest, easiest path to profit with no consideration given to the customer.
We're luckier than those in Australia as we have the larger Telecom to keep TelstraClear (at least partially) in line, Telecom themselves have never been especially liked (128k ADSL with 10Gigs of traffic for around $35US is the norm here) but at least there's some form of competition to keep Telstra being the sole provider and forcing people on to their soulless customer service and profit mongering.
Could you elaborate? What is it about Sweden that makes such cheap high-speed connections possible? Ethernet to the home? How did that come to be?
Here in Tokyo, I've got a 10mbit connection for about $38 AUS dollars/month, And could switch to a 100mbit (cable) cxn for about ~$60 AUS dollars. No cap. I'd average 1 Gig a day download (more on weekends). In Aus, I'd be paying literally thousands of dollars for that. And everyone here complains Japan is backward compared to countries like Sth Korea.
I hope it improves by the time I return.
I recently spent 1year in Australia while studying abroad in Melbourne. Let me first Preface this by saying that I love Australia, and am seriously considering moving there to work for the design company I worked for while in school abroad. As a CS major, I have over the last couple few years adopted several friends websites which I host on a menagerie of various beeping boxes. I would say that the beeping metal boxes are the closest things I have to children, and that they thirst for one thing... bandwidth. The connection (know to me affectionately as the porn pipe) I currently have in the states is a 768kbs symmetrical cable broadband link to the rest of the world. It is a business account that I get through my cable provider. When tallying up the added discounts I receive from my digital cable, and digital telephone, my internet connection is costing me around $190.00USD/mo. Luckily I manage to recoup around $100.00 of that each month from the 8 sites I host. 190.00USD/mo would get me a 256kbs/128kbs with caps set to around 20GB/mo in Australia. It's a sick sad world down under with regards to the current state of Broadband. Sadly, this is such an issue for me that I would choose to not move to AU, just because of the craziness that is their Internet Access. I mean, my friend just got set up with fiber internet.. If you ask me Australia is hurting their own tech industry with these kinds of caps. I think I will go back to my porn pipe now... !!Dont be a tool.
When I was back in Melbourne I had a Telstra 512k/256k ADSL link, which cost me AUD$90 a month, capped at 3Gb, dynamic IP address, no servers allowed on your connection, yada yada yada. And it was up and down like a yo-yo.
Here in the UK I now have ADSL from a local ISP (Nildram) at 1Mpbs/256k, costing AUD$100 a month, no cap, static IP address, and you are allowed to host any kind of server you like. And the service is rock-solid.
Basic premiss of this argument: Telstra blows. I rarely use the word 'hate' about anything, but I do HATE Telstra.
I'm not looking forward to moving back in a year's time and having to get such pisspoor service again (but I am looking forward to some sunshine!).
Telstra:
1.keeps increasing telephone charges (line rental in particular keeps going up and up).
2.has expensive costs for getting phone line hooked up in the first place.
3.owns all the local phone system and most of the national phone network.
4.owns a large amount of the national data networks.
and 5.rips off ADSL customers (both its own and its competitors)
The basic problem is that if you want to have ADSL connected (no matter which ISP) you need to pay a large connection fee, a big chunk of which goes to telstra.
And, you also need to pay a large monthly fee, a large bit of which goes to telstra for line-rental and crap.
Basicly, telstra is a monopoly and like many monopolies, it abuses that power. And our government doesnt give a stuff.
Another thing to remember is that ever since the first geek set-up the first BBS all those years ago, telcos have tried to stop the growth of online communications.
No, you're wrong. I got cable just after introduction and they definitely used to offer unlimited downloads.
I moved to Optus Cable who had an excellent fair use policy that averaged out around 12Gb/month, but they moved to 3Gb/month soon after. At least they let you run your contract out on the old terms...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
I don't know why it's come to be like this, but I think it's a happy result of the IT-boom era. My ISP started years ago to dig real fibre to common households, and since IT was the main fad those days, they got all the money they needed. But they made clear from the beginning that they weren't expecting to make profit at least until five years later. I think they are starting to about now, but I'm not sure. But I'm sure they will in the not too distant future. And since that company has such a great offer, the other companies are forced to invest in better technologies, too. The only catch for the fibre option is that it's not available for single houses, at least not normally. And you have to connect all apartments in the house, but I think the initial investment cost isn't too high. After that, you're free to sign up for an account or not. You don't have to subscribe, you just have an ethernet socket in your apartment if you want to. And now they have the VDSL option for those who can't get fibre, so things are looking good :)
Meep.
Not only is Telstra a monopoloy, but the copper wire infrastructure laid down, does not support DSL connections to all households. Many newer housing estates and some older ones, have equipment called a RIM (some sort of multiplexor) which allows telstra to dish out more household phone lines without laying down more copper wire. I am one of those poor unfortunate souls behind a RIM, who would dearly like ADSL, but cannot get it. My physical location is less then 2000m from an exchange which is ADSL capable. I still get charged the same line rental as somebody who isn't behind a RIM.
Oz is a landmass equal to the USA, but with only 18million people. We are able to enjoy the outdoors for most of the year, so more people have a life away from fkn computers and the internet. It costs more to install bacause of lower population density, and the example of things better in the USA are often only based on local or regional prices, and not on national prices. ADSL will only work over 4 kms or so, on ggod copper pair, while the average distance for a suburban customer is not much less than that, so someone will miss out. The monoply is shrinting, but the returns are too low for other companies to take up the slack. The originator and Wirlpool distort the story for their own benefit, try to get more facts before posting crap!
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is a complete nightmare, although not helped by them teaming up with an equally clueless company across the ditch who provides the spangly "NTI plus II" hardware.
The bastard things allmost completely unsupported - nobody knows how it works, the documentation got translated through tagalog and half the time it drops out and then locks up on data calls.
And compliant my ass! Suprised the fuckers don't burn down more houses.
Telstra's ADSL service stinks. Where I am it tends to be broken about 5 days per month. Today the DNS servers where broken/inaccessible for about an hour or so. A few weeks ago their mail servers were down. The only thing worse than their service delivery is their customer support.
The URL MacFox posted doesn't work - there is a space in the PDF file name. I'm interested to view this link!
"+1 Sheep" love the parent sig, an australian that can actually take a sheep joke, there is a first for everything
^Z
[1]+ Stopped
Same with me, too. We signed up to Telstra pretty early in the piece, and as our prices got higher and higher, we considered pulling out but there really weren't any decent alternatives. Then they introduced the 3 gig cap, so goodbye Telstra. Now I just keep 56k on at home, and do any serious leeching at work (or the old fashioned sneakernet with richer friends). I wonder how many other aussies are doing the same thing as me, holding of hooking broadband back up until there is some semblance of service and/or decent pricing. On an unrelated note, when Telstra came around to do the install, the guy dropped his drill through the roof in the office (after drilling directly through the middle of a support beam in the roof for the cable, and breaking off the door jam with his 2000 ft steel ladder) leaving a basketball sized hole in our roof. 18 months later, and Telstra is STILL jerking us around over the repair for the job, because they claim it is their contractor's responsibilty to fix, while the contractor claims it was work done on Telstra's behalf, so he isn't doing a thing until he gets directions from the big T. Their customer service is about as painless as scrubbing your arse with steel wool, and about as beneficial. When our cable connection dropped out once, I made the mistake of telling them my box was Linux, and they refused to do a thing to help me until I'd installed Windows because according to them, Linux is not popular enough to justify supporting. When I mentioned that I would bet that most of the servers using their network would run something other than Windows, the customer service guy (outsourced to india, of course) called me a smartarse and hung up on me. Fuckwits. I'm sure EVERY Australian has a MILLION horror stories about Telstra.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
Bugger broadband mate, give me a coupla milo tins and some telecom rope.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Most people who have a phone connection in Australia use Telstra. In the old days we used to get charged Line Rental. I assume this was for the use of the copper between your home and the exchange. If you get ADSL your ISP pays around $30 a month "line rental" for the same bit of copper you are already renting for your standard telephone. Take that off the price of most ADSL deals and your looking at a decent price for Broadband, ie paying for what you use. I haven't looked at my phone bill in great detail recently but I belive what used to read Line Rental is now referred to as a service charge.
Several people have mentioned that Telstra is the only ADSL provider in Australia. That is not infact true, rslcom (www.rslcom.com) also provide ADSL. They use all their own equipment and put it in the exchanges, the only part of the telstra network they use is two pieces of copper (no switching or anything). Their major reseller is request (www.request.com)
Australia has been one of Asia's pioneers in telecom deregulation as well as in the adoption of new technology.
Since when did Australia become part of Asia? Australia is not part of Asia!
I remember back in high school, there was this economics simulation game we all played in class where every team owned a pen company and competed with the other teams. One of the first lessons that we learned is that 1000 pens at $1 each actually nets you mor emoney than 1 pen at $1000. It sounds like they should be the same, but in the $1000 pen case, you either get it all, or get nothing, but in the $1 pen case you can still make some money even if you don't sell everything.
The problem is broadband in Austrailia is that the monopolies cannot understand this fact of business.
The current population of Australia is about 20 million people. So at a 2% adoption rate, even if they could really, REALLY gouge thier customers at say $500 a month(!) then they stand to gain $200,000,000 a month, gross. Now, if by charging $25 dollars a month they could get a 50% adoption rate, then they will actually make $50,000,000 MORE a month than they did charging $500. That's a 20% increase in income and a 2,000% decrease in price! Everybody wins!
That's right, you can charge less of a price and still make more money, it really is possible... Even a hard core monopoly should at least care about making more money. If you can make more money as a company AND provide better service to more customers, then do it! It is absolute blind, and stupid, greed, and probably a little misanthropy mixed in for good measure, that they don't spend a few days to crunch the numbers and actually see that it's possible to make more money and more happy customers doing things a different way.
Last I heard, the Australian government owns approx. 49% of Telstra, a major telco. I believe the previous poster is correct in that the AU gov is looking to liquidate some of its shares.
Talking to Australians who live in Toowoomba, Dalby, and Longreach (L. is near the edge of the 'outback'), the residents feel that a fully privately owned telco would not provide adequate (or any) service to those living in the countryside. Granted that this is a small amount of the population (and problems like this also exist in the rural US), the purpose of being publically owned is in the intrest of ALL people. So that all Australians can communicate.
Yes, [A]DSL sucks there now, but consider that the entire population of the contry/continent of Australia is about the same as the population of New York State.
From other posts in this topic, sounds like alternatives are slowly becomming available.
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Gives me
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Can't they CBQ limit dynamically according to what's available?
And why can't we buy per k/bit, with it limited to bands?
Too awkward? Too liberal I expect.
A blog I run for the wealth
In sydney I have Optus cable. Costs about $70 per month. Its fast enough for me. I can watch streaming movies. Download huge files relatively quickly. And I share it with 2 other computers for my parents. If you need something faster than this, you need to get out more and enjoy the best country in the world. (Just my opinion - not trolling)
Besides we should support Optus as they are competition for Telstra.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
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I'll say! Commendable journalism: short, quick and to the point! And they still manage to get it partly wrong... (occurred, not occured)
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
... just today i spent 90 minutes on the phone to various reps trying to find out what type of line splitting (pair gain) technology I was on and exactly how it was preventing me from getting DSL and ISDN, so that I could write a letter to someone who might be able to do something about it. The were all very friendly but mostly unhelpful.
The best answer I could get was that I should lodge an official application for ADSL, and that when a line tech phoned back to tell me I couldn't get it, that I should ask him/her.
I don't think there is anything special about Sweden, it's just that several companies got the idea that they should market Ethernet to the home, and it turns out it's not that much more expensive than DSL or cable. I'm surprised that no corporations in other countries have attempted to do the same.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
The good thing about NZ is that you do get unlimited domestic traffic and that there are loads of mirrors to get the files that you need.
Move over to Oz and the 3 gig cap includes traffic from inside Australia. That really sucks.
I'm actually using this telco as we speak, and sometimes, i actually consider NOT clicking on the comments section on the fear that its not worth the 146kb ( 1024 / 14c/mb ) people think that they are giving me.
Sometimes your comments cost ME $0.02 AUD
Lazz wrote:
> I love my bpc.
>
> It's a great service.
That's BCP. Check yuor settings. Hope this helps.
You do have to pay to ISPs fees on top unfortanetly but it's a great system. Plus you can get PayTV and free local calls down the same line. Using VideoLAN and the new i3 Set Top Box the're supplying you can even watch the TV on your computer, without a capture card. Yay!
I'd rather burn my money than give it to Telstra.
I live 8 miles from Parliament house in Canberra, and I can't get anything faster than 33k dialup.
Doesn't look like that will change until late 2004 when TransACT finally roll out in my suburb.
Not Happy, Jan.
The earth is 98% full, please delete anyone you can!
Poor lil' JITter - it never stood a chance.
This sounds all too familar to me and many others in Ireland.
In Ireland you can get 512K DSL for â50+/- but it has a 5GB Cap per month.
Think thats bad, for every 1GB after that it'll cost you â36.
The only packages worth anything cost â109 per month for a 512k uncapped service, but its very limited.
Much more info available @ www.irelandoffline.org
In Australia even the plans for businesses are laughable. This is actually a huge problem, how can internet services get even started without bandwidth?
The only entities with good access are universities and the CSIRO. They layed down AARNET in Australia 25 years ago, and now they are enjoying 100mb+ accesses. On AARNET the typical 600MB CD-ROM gets
downloaded in 10-20 minutes...
WoW!!! 6800MB over dialup... and 650 hours. That's 27 DAYS!!! Your computer was connected 90% of the time. Did you ever make phone calls?
Well... try it without the space. It worked for me. Just in case, here it is.
Comcast Sucks! This is why we need more competition for high speed internet access. I don't have access to DSL, and T1 is too expensive.
The upload cap is brutal, so gaming is possible if you wish to play with a handicap!
A workmate recently got a Dodo connection installed and they must work on some sort of large-scale cache system because commonly accessed pages (ninemsn.com.au for example) load quickly, whereas you are lucky if you can get an uncached page to load at all. Stay away from Dodo at all costs!
So, we're going to propose more government to solve a problem that was created by government in the first place? That's duct tape. It might appear to fix the problem at first, but eventually it will get worse.
The permanent solution is to eliminate the powers of government which created the monopoly in the first place. We need open competition, not centralized power.
Heh. I got hit by bittorrent too. I was relatively lucky, I was only hit with a $20 excess usage fee (13.9c /MB over). That is what you get for running bittorrent over night with out keeping a close eye on the amount of traffic that you have used.
but being charged by the mb / gb is just wrong
How do you thing your ISP is charged? How do you think your ISP's ISP is charged?
For that matter, how do you pay for your electricity? Flat rate? I don't think so. And being that you're in the UK, I bet your local calls aren't even flat rate.
This will all only be solved when bits become like tap water, or electricity, where you pay per unit used, but it's low enough that it feels freeish to most people. There's no other long term sustainable model.
I can't wait till I get my plastic fibre to my home, and this can all be settled.
I have ADSL in Oz with iprimus and it's great. I pay AU$100 (US$50) a month for 125/512 upstream downstream and a 5 gig cap. Its rare that I have problems.
:)
You can get cheaper, but I'm willing to pay for good service.
Apart from that Oz really is the best country in the world.
Life's a package deal, and mine is OK as a whole.
be vigilant, be pure, behave
Being that this is slashdot, I feel compelled to mention that that rate is more geometric (i.e. times 4) than exponential (i.e. e to the ...)....but I digress.
Good to see things are turning around over there... in Canada government regulation/subsidies have actually done a lot of good for cheapish broadband. We're getting unlimited broadband through a program with the local universties (at our house, not on campus) at $29.16/month!
I live in Iceland which is, similar to Australia, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but water.
:)
:P
We too have a cap on adsl, but only on downloading from abroad. For an example, my connection has a 1 GB free abroad download cap. It can get as low as 100 MB with other ISP's.
This is due to the connection Iceland has with the outside world, an underwater string (to Sweden and the USA) which, although not being expensive, has limited bandwith.
But where there is a problem, there is always a solution. Many ADSL users have p2p programs aimed to download only from peers inside the country. The most popular program being cc++ It currently has about 5000 icelandic people constantly online sharing files with each other, which is pretty neat considering that the population of the country is around 280.000.
Aside from that, when I dl maybe a linux iso I try to do it from a local mirror, we have quite a few of them, especially for linux
I am pretty positive that the dl & upload restrictions in Australia are due to the continent's connection to abroad and therefore I recommend to Australians to try our way, it works
My other UID is 1337
Australia is increasingly considering itself part of Asia. Afterall, our nearest neighbour Indonesia is Asian. And most of our trade these days is with Asia. And if you are in the right neigbourhood in Australia you would think that you were actually in Asia.
In some cases they are more expensive, but with Internode you get quality. I highly recommend their ADSL plans: http://adsl.internode.on.net/pricing/price-list-pe rsonal.htm
The author of the story has no idea. It is purely driven by ideology.
To compare Australia to Hong Kong, for a start, is sheer perversity. Australia is a huge country with a small population. Hong Kong is very densely populated and small. Guess which one has the cheapest broadband rates?
Telstra is obliged, by law, to give access to all areas of the country, which includes many remote areas with very small populations. The cost of this is enourmous.
It is worth noting the trials of many in the US, with a fully private communications industry. For example, I am constantly amused by Jerry Pournelles trials and tribulations at getting broadband to his house, in the middle of Hollywood.
The local loop is a natural monopoly, unless you are going to put down cable for every new broadband/telephone company. In a country like Australia, the costs could never be justified.
Yes, Telstra is charging too much for broadband, but that is because the government wants it to get it's share price up for a future sale of the rest of the company.
Stupid article.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
> I got billed $800 on a Dial-Up account because I went over their "Unlimited" 500 meg limit.
$800 for going over dialup? I think that's the saddest story I've ever heard. Talk about adding insult to injury. Sorry man.
By the way, who is Wil Wheton?
I guess this article and comments just show how important it has become to research broadband solutions before choosing a place to live.
I recently was looking at some land to purchase in the U.S. It was decent land and an okay price, but before I even talked to the owner, I went to one of the neighbors and asked, "do you get cable out here." He thought it was an odd question to stop by someone's house and ask, but I'm not going to make a six figure investment on house and land that does not get broadband. He said "Yes".
It happened to be on the edge of an area that Time Warner had recently added digital cable, but I wasn't sure if this property was too far out in the boonies or not. I knew it wasn't going to get DSL, wireless hadn't made it to the area yet, and I don't care for satellite. Time Warner cable, although hella expensive (compared to what I pay now) would be an acceptable solution.
Just shows how times change and priorities (like being in a good school district) get moved down the totem poll. Actually, I ended up not choosing that land because I found a plot that had the same broadband available, was in a better school district, and had a pond in the neighboring property.
Sorry if this is slightly off-topic.
Here in Poland we may only dream about broadband Internet access (at least in minor cities, and in periphery of those bigger ones). TP (Polish Telecom) holds monopoly (theoretically it doesn't, but practically it does) on it and prices are absolutely outrageous.
I.e. 24h/day DIALUP costs you more than 1000 $ / month (US dollars).
And there's not much to do with it... If you're unlucky and live in 99% of country where there's no possibility of other provider, you may have only dial-up.
Broadband is cheaper (about 200$/month) but is available only in some regions. And it won't change soon because TP doesn't invest any money in local departments...
Cheers, Przemek
Well the broadband is starting to get better with newer unlimited ADSL plans out 512/128 including TPG at about AUD$80 whereas Telstraâ(TM)s 3gb capped on is almost AUD$100. Unfortunately it seems you can either go with a decent connection with massively painful cap or get a half decent plan that has crappy, pings, speeds dropouts etc...
Telstra really screwed over its customers, original the plan was AUD$67 a month for unlimited, then they raised the price, then they cap it at 3 GB then they raised the price again. Being the only ADSL provider at the time there was nothing anyone could do unless they went back to dialup or were lucky enough to be in a cable area and could get Optus (although the Optus cable plan is now capped also). Of course Telstra have stopped bothering to lay down the fiberoptic connection being able to force more money out of DSL and satellite pay-tv.
1.00 AUD = 0.663473 USD (xe.com)
cat
There was a proposal put forward by the Labor opposition last year to do something like this. The idea was similar to what the original post described, in that Telstra would be split into two corporations; but one of the would have been a government-owned monopoly which owned and maintained the telecommunications infrastructure. The other corporation was to be privately-owned and in the business of selling services.
It's a bit different to what you describe with Railtrack. When the UK Conservative government split up the rail industry, they privatised the whole thing, so the infrastructure was privately owned and run by people whose main interest was to return value to their shareholders. In the end it became a complete fiasco, as you describe. Perhaps the question is: would it have worked any better if they had kept Railtrack public and just privatised the bits that used the infrastructure, i.e. the train companies?
The problem with the situation in Australia is that there is one company, half public and half private, which has a monopoly on the infrastructure but is expected to compete and play fair with the other service providers, all of them relying on the resources that Telstra owns. And if it's a conflict of interest now, wait until Telstra becomes 100% public.
To split up Telstra in the way that Labor were suggesting would have cost Telstra billions of dollars, wiping about 20% off their share price, but I tend to think that it would be better to take the hit now, rather than pay in the long term by having a greedy monopolist in charge, that is quite happy to keep Australia's telecommunications systems lagging several years behind the rest of the world.
On the bright side--I'm quite happy with my ISP: 6 GB of peak time downloads per month and unlimited off-peak downloads over a 512/256kbps link for A$77/month.
Australia and New Zealand both have overpriced internet access however its not due to small pipes out to the the major exchanges, its due to greed of the local phone compaines.
:-)
The pipes are the 1st excuse. Boy is it a lame one too. It turns out that AT&T recently decided it was too expensive to maintain repeaters every 20km and repalced them with ones that have a greater distance and now they have something like a 1000x the bandwidth they had before. Soutern Cross just upgraded its repeaters and now has more bandwidth than the can sell plus most of the speculators are tring to offlaod their unused bandwith as well. Plus Tyco may be running a new fiber which will keep the stock holders happy about keeping orders up for undersea fiber and the laying ships busy even though the bandwidth side of the businesse may not be looking so hot. Why have 3 bad divisions when you can have one?
The second excuse is that Australia is a big place and Telstra has to provide coverage everywhere. Thats kind of ture but there are parts of Australia the size of many US states that has zero population and no one asking for a phone. Throw in the fact that two cities have a larger population than Chicago now. With the other cities 96% of the population lives within 25,000 meters (or yards) of an exchange (but not by ADSL distance) or cell tower. Telstra does have to spend a bit on rural areas but its no different than the western part of the US midwest and they don't have to worry about ice.
The only real excuse is Telstra is a luxury tax which helps the goverment and what a lovely tax it is. Outside of the 3rd world, Telstra is the most expensive phone company in the world for people who use the phone.
The interconnect fees are out of line. Its cheaper for me to call the US or UK on some cell phones than it is to call the other side of town. with Orange, its cost twice as much to call a land line in Australia than it does to call a landline in the US. Phone rates in New Zeland are equally out of line. With some plans its the same price if you call a phone in NZ, Aus, US or the UK.
Right now I've got a few Canopy access points. I also have access to a roof on one of the tallest building in town and 10mb ISP uplink. I've got racks of isp gear and everything I need to sell ISP service execpt for one small thing, a Telecomunications License. Thats $10,000 up front and more every year. You also have to be the right kind of company to get the license but the license lets you do things like run wire in the ground and resell inetnet access.
So if anyone near Melbourne wants to buy an unlimited 2mb pipe, I can set you up. The gear is only about $1500 and it takes about 2 hrs to set up so the setup fee would be about $11,800
I also have an AP on a very tall hill just outside of the outer burbs and I can't sell bandwidth from there either.
And for those that say Telstra won't sell unlimited business broadband, they will but only in New Zealand and a 1.5mb adsl link is NZ$500/mo +gst. The same thing in Australia would cost you something like $38,556 in over use charges if you could keep the pipe full for a full month.
People in both countries need to pull their heads out and figure out they need a Public Utilities Commission but everyone seems to be so happy with the TIO and ACCC and the other groups that aren't looking out for anyone.
Excuse me while I hop on over to the Information Super Outback! Thanks Telstra!
It's not just the line, you know. The DSLAM on the other end of the line is Telstra, the authentication servers are often Telstra (depends on ISP), Telstra controls the exchange's internal routing, etc. They hide a lot of this from you by tunneling your connection to your ISP, but trust me it matters.
The more of your service is Telstra based, the less reliable your service. Personal experience only, of course (if I didn't say so, Telstra might disconnect me, after all...)
As for linux support - Westnet are quite good about it. I've often called them and quickly explained the problem, plus the things that make me think it's not on my end, and they'll say "yeah, cool, we'll look into it". Words like "linux," "syslog," and even "tcpdump" and "ethereal" tend to result in relief rather than rejection often. As in, phew, not another 'doze user where we can't actually debug the problem.
I've been known to say something like: "something is broken here, I'm getting line sync but PPPoE PADI requests don't get any answering PADO. I'd say it's telstra's PPPoE servers or the ATM links to your auth servers." and I don't get the response *blink* *blink* "Umm... click start, run..." - ever. More commonly, it's "Oh? ... clickety click ... yeah, your're right, first we heard of it. I'll get someone to go and yell at Telstra now, we'll call you back when it's up." Y'know what? They call me back :-) . Need I say more?
Seriously, most of my profs over here discourage using the Internet for primary research for projects (journal search thru Library is different though). In fact, I have been criticized for not using enough 'books' in papers, despite the fact that every single one relevant to my topic was already checked out of the library.
In short, when it comes to the 'net there's no place like home. 15 days till I'm on a plane back to the USA - boy do I miss it.
VERIZON!
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
broadband market if things don't change soon. Uptake has dropped off, the number of providers has dropped of and the price is rising not falling..Go King George Go, by the time he has finished helping the industry, the US will be back to BBS's and 14.4 dial-up.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Well, actually this is the same situation we have in Spain:
Telefonica controls the local loop, is the largest mobile carrier (Movistar), is the largest ISP (forked Terra and now is buying it again), is the major shareholder of Grupo Admira, wich controls the biggest pay TV company (Via Digital) and part of several media groups.
And now, for something completely different...
The problem is that Telstra has always been the First World's most clueless-about-data telco. Yes, India's VSNL has always been worse, but they have real infrastructure and economic difficulties as well as being clueless, as do places like Thailand or Mongolia. Australia doesn't have that excuse. The data cap business is set at such a low level that it also kills couch-potato applications like downloading videos, as well as killing web servers. And worse, US cable companies are starting to pick up on the broadband-cap idea - many of them have also been suicidally clueless, but at least they had competition, and there were stupid things they hadn't thought of.
Back in 1990, Telstra was ravingly clueless about ISDN, worse than 90% of the US local telcos - they thought that the only reason to use a PRI was to get 30 B channels of small connections from BRIs, and weren't useful about that; friends of mine wanted to use PRIs to dial bigger connections (e.g. 384 video or fatter data connections), but Telstra not only didn't support it, they didn't know why anyone might want such a thing. They haven't acquired any new clues since then, as near as I can tell.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Don't you have satellite? I think your situation would be ideal for satellite. I mean, your latency would be shit, but if you can only get ~1GB a month, that's not a lot.. I probably use that much in a few days. This is online gaming, pcduo from work, stream mp3s from my home server...
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
I'm an Aussie who currently lives in the U.S. I get DSL with no cap at $34.95 a month, basically about $10 more a month more than a dialup account would cost. My parents in Oz run a website as part of their business and they're *still* on dial-up, basically doing twice daily email check & ftp uploads. They pay for dialup about what I pay for broadband.
I wonder.....
An ISP has a download cap and charges for excess, but they count data delivered to the the client. Now, since many ISPs:
1. Run tranparent web proxies
2. Modify their DNS servers to cache data beyond the times specified in the zone data
Could one argue that the ISP is delivering data that the client did not request, since it is out of date when compared to what is on the web server (effect of web caching) or the ISP got the data from the wrong web server (effect of non-complient DNS caching)? And hence the ISP's accounting of download data is fraudulent?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Lithopix...
The article is making a mistake in comparing Australia to Hong Kong and Japan. Australia is a country with a relatively small population spread out over large distances. One problem that the telicos are facing is do you run cable 100km out to a town of 1000 people?
Much of the population in Australia is concentrated in the cities, however even the cities are not comparable to most other coutries, the reason being that everyone wants a house on a 1/4 acre block. I have heard it said that Australia is *geographically* the largest city in the world with a population of only 4-5 million. The issue is one of density, the telicos don't neccessarily get a good ROI for installing services.
meh
I use Netspace ADSL in Australia. The plan speed is 512k(Dowbload)/128k(Upload), price $99.95 and limit 7Gb/7Gb (14Gb total). Compare this to having a second phone line($25) plus call costs($0.2) and include the ISP charges($30) then it's not bad value for the performance increase and increased bandwidth cap. Australia's real problem is the tyranny of distance, within the country and to the rest of the world. Large area's of the country have population densities similar to Antarctica. They rely on radio phone(14.4K max) for their communications and political organisations such as Country Wide subsidise the huge cost of connecting them with funds from city folk. I don't think many people in Europe and America have their Groceries, Mail and medicine delivered once a week by aeroplane or drive 500Km's without seeing a petrol station. GB limit's however make little sense when multi-plexing technology has allowed exponential growth of data transfer along existing lines?
Getting a "tunnel reset" through Telstra is pretty much instant. Exact same service through anyone else (who have to ask Telstra to do it) is 1-2days. Try surviving that when it happens 4 hours before a print deadline and customers 3000km away are still trying to ship you stuff to print.
Optus and Request DSL (where they're operating through their own DSLAMs not via Telstra) very, very rarely fail (I have customers with continuous connection times up around a year, some of them have never had an interruption) - there would be hardly any need for this "service" in the first place if Telstra as a company were competent and benign. This is not to disparage the many dedicated and careful Telstra techs out there, but there must be a few rotten apples in that barrel.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
http://www.shorewalker.com/pages/broadband_noncris is-1.html
I thought this guys comment on the whole thing was kind of interesting...
The name wasn't coined by El Reg, it has been widely used in Oz for a very long time. Alston is very bad news across the board. He doesn't have a clue, and most of his consultants don't have a clue. They can't even find the tracks, let alone buy a ticket for the clue-train. Actually get aboard? Ho, ho, ho, 'tis to laugh! It still amazes me that he actually said something positive about F/LOSS, it's so totally out of character. His only rivals for the throne of King Luddite are some of the State ministers (and Premiers) who are of the mind "show me the reporters and nobody gets hurt". They launch this and that program and inititative and every single plan is a complete fuckup wall-to-wall from day minus one. I think someone should shoot their consultants, all of them. Whatever fills the vacuum has to be better. Do I seem upset? You watch these jokers in action, and see if you don't get hot under the collar too!
Lookout...I'm about to rave and swear a lot. If you're offended by bad language, don't read this. *gets on soap box* Telstra are a bunch of fucking assholes. Here in Perth we are bombarded left right and centre with ads telling us to get on broadband for only $$$ a month etc etc. Man I wish! I've been trying to get ADSL for fucking ages, but I can't. I live in a fairly new suburb and I would have expected to be able to get this service quick and easy. I live less than 3km from the local exchange, and a friend around the corner (about 4.5km away from the exchange) has had ADSL for ages. But do you think I can get ADSL? No goddamn it! After a lot of fucking around on the phone, the web, and heaps of stress, I managed to finally get hold of a Telstra operator who knew what the fuck was going on and how to use the bloody computer system. She told me that line my house is on is hooked up to a RIM, which means the hardware is incompatible. When I asked her why this is, she explained that ADSL only works on copper lines, and that RIMs are a cheaper way to provide regular telephone capability to new lines (I think because they use optical cable). So there is no way in hell I can get a decent land link unless I pay to have a dedicated line put it, which is just way to much. Give me some fucking service you cunts! My only option seems to be to go satellite, but I really don't want to do this (mainly because of transfer rates and interference from the airport in my backyard...yes I live in The Castle!). There was a recent test in Canberra to get RIMs to provide some ADSL support, and even though there was limited success Telstra have not proceeded with the solution, leaving poor dicks like me out in the cold. Bastards! So everytime a bloody broadband ad comes on TV my blood pressure goes through the roof and I'm very tempted to throw shit at my TV. To all you guys who get broadband that are complaining about the cost...stop your goddamn whining you lucky bastards! As you can tell, I'm very upset and pissed off about this. Getting information from Telstra is like brushing your teeth through your asshole...it's painful, useless, and you don't know where the fuck you're going. They're a bunch of incompetent beaurocrats and are only in business because they hold the bloody monopoly. AAAAaaaarrrrggghhh! *gets off soap box*
And then there are reports from people who tried to sign up with other ISPs to be told by Telstra that the line was not up to scratch. Then they apply to Telstra's ISP and are told that the line is capable after all.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Granted the condition of broadband internet access in Australia is bad, (very bad) but things are getting better.
News of anti-competative behavior by Telstra is coming to light, which is a frequent but not well know pratice.
There are alot of good adsl offers, iinet, ausforces, internode, hypermax. But with limited adsl supported exchanges and extremely limited ports on those, getting a connection is more luck that anything, especailly when Tesltra can effectively refuse connection on a whim, citing line noise or excessive load on their copper twisted pair network.
Things are unlikely to change, though optus, a rival telco has layed their own lines and built some of their own infastructure, the level of coverage is not comparible. Last i checked cable internet conectivity was located to only 3 cities in Australia.
Prices are still high, but adsl resellers are making a good effort to make adsl as affordable as they can, (and they are compared to what bigpond offers)
Plans for always-on untimed ISDN are on the table, for people who are not in range of a asdl supporting exchange or are not allowed to get a connection for some reason or another.
www.whirlpool.net.au is the best source for info on broadband in australia.
Many countries, as a matter of fact. Even Germany, from what I heard. Here we are on the internet, and we know so little about the world we can communicate across in a few microseconds.
Have you been living under a rock for the past 3 years or something? Please tell me just one tech company whose shares didn't fall 50% since late 1999. Just one - I dare ya.
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
Optus Cable has monthly caps but they don't charge you extra if you go over. They just slow you down to 28k (yes, a very old dial up).
You see, I can gamble online and stream whatever I want from home, as long as the online casino and my server are in Iceland. I use more than 1 GB a day just dl'ing movies, but I dl them from other Icelanders, not from abroad. :)
My other UID is 1337
Wow! I'm impressed that you're able to find the majority of the content you want in Iceland. I guess I just kind of picture it like finding everything I need in my city (4 million people). Damn, I may just have to move to Iceland... :)
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
Let's ditch this bogus "monopolies are bad" stuff. Canada has universal cheap broadband through Government monopoly. Broadband penetration is the highest of any industrialised country, price is lowest.
Don't even get me started on broadband in Australia. It really aggravates me to see the powers that be in this country delude themselves into thinking that broadband here is anything less than woefully overpriced and unreliable.
I lived in Hong Kong for around half a year, and I had an ADSL plan. For around HKD$180 a month I had 3Mb of bandwidth, and no download limits (or "Acceptable Use Policy" that the ISPs here ran in lieu of a finite number). The price has dropped further. Depending on if you're living in the right area, you can get a 12Mb full duplex VDSL link, with no download limits, for HKD$36 a month - that's AUD$7 a month!
I downloaded 60GB and uploaded 75GB a month, every month, for half a year without a peep from my provider. I had one outage, which lasted for a day.
My link ran at the rated 3Mb/sec in my ISP's local network, with reasonable rates out of the country.
I'm now on cable, and if I overstep my 3GB limit I get rate shaped to 28.8Kb/sec. I pay twice as much for a service that may be "faster", but its completely useless when I have to watch the download stats like a hawk.
Lets see Telstra offer something even remotely like that, or allow the competitors the ability to match it.
I have a seperate phone line, perfect for the dial-up user, should have got aDSL but didn't have any available services in my area at the time I had to choose between the two.
Four days after you asked the question I answered it, if you ever see this I would be rather surprised.
Read Errant Story.
He played Wesley Crusher in star trek.
His blog is pretty good: http://wilwheaton.net
So don't hold his history against him.
Read Errant Story.
and is a 50% shareholder in the biggest pay TV company.'"
People still pay for TV?
Why?
I've recently moved
from a place where it's illegal for me to watch TV (because I didn't have a reception license), and where I didn't have TV reception equipment,
to a place where there is both TV reception equipment
and an appropriate license.
Naturally, having seen what is available on TV, my watching has decreased.
Are people still falling for this spam-ridden fool-trap?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"