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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.'"
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).
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.
Maybe for you. Maybe for everyone who bought shares.
But for the people who actually use Telstra it would not have been any easier to take at all.
Frankly even if broadband was perfect I would be somewhat worried that the Government is selling Telstra off for a value of only $45 Billion or so.
Thats only $2500 per Australian.
You could not even lay copper to each person's door for that amount of money let alone the rest of the infrastructure.
Check out this democrat's pdf (different to US democrats) for plenty of other good reasons why selling our goose that lays the golden egg is a bad idea.
There most certainly isn't anything "wrong" with it... when they setup the network they planned for 1-5 second pings during peak hours. So by their perception you are actually getting one of their "better" connections.
Sorry, couldn't resist. I know the kind of bullshit companies will pull. A couple years back when I got my first DSL line it took a full 4 months from my first signing up for service before I actually got my first connection to the DSLAM. All the while PacBell (the provider at that time, now SBC) told me every day "Your connection will be up tomorrow, don't worry".
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
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
.. 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 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.
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
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"?
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.
I downloaded RedHat 8 on Telstra cable. Came to about 1.5Gb. I had a 3Gb cap.
Being a bit of a software dev nut, I also downloaded things like J#, updates to the .NET framework, the Java SDK, Apache 2 and related modules (PHP, Perl, Python), security updates for windows and ... well you can see where this is going, can't you?
I've spoken of all legit software, but in a week, without trying, I could have pushed my cap - and then paid the 20c per Mb over the limit.
No fuckin' thanks. I'm glad it serves you well, but to me it's barely worth the money. I'm currently on a dial-up with no download cap and unlimited hours (by lack of choice - no ADSL/Cable in a new estate apparrently) - and I'm almost as happy as I would be with cable.
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"?
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.
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!