Australia Gets 8Mbit/s Broadband now, 20Mbit Soon

danwarne writes "Whirlpool is reporting the 'bad old days' of slow, expensive broadband in Australia might be over, with the large ISP iiNet unveiling broadband internet up to 8Mbit/s, from $29/mth. It has been installing its own DSLAMs into the exchanges of Australia's incumbent telco, Telstra, which limits internet access speeds to a maximum of 1.5MBit/s. iiNet boss Michael Malone says as soon as the ADSL2+ standard is approved for use in Australia (which should be in a month or two), he intends to switch the DSLAMs over to offering 20Mbit/s speeds. It looks like Telstra and Optus, the two incumbent telcos in Australia might have their duopoly on high speed broadband (10Mbit/s cable internet) challenged, with potentially great ramifications for price competition in Australia. The only downside noted by Whirlpool readers is that iiNet is forcing customers to take their long distance phone service as well to get access to the 8Mbit/s speeds, a move which is ironically reminiscent of the tactics used by Telstra and Optus."

Comments

That might sound fine

[Exter-C]

That might sound fine but in reality there is not enough bandwidth in the IINET network to handle even 100 of these connections at full speed let alone having thousands of users. The price per port for the IP ports (Oc12 or whatever) is still way to expensive to be able to cover the costs in any sort of reasonable time frame.

Re:That might sound fine

[ender81b]

Hate to break it to you but that's how most ISP's work. Very, very, very rarely do you have more than 5% of your theoretical max bandwith available. IE if you have 1000 DSL customers all at 1.5/384 you can easily get away with having a single DS-3. Very few people (even geeks) use their connections at max bandwith for more than a few minutes a day.

Part of this of course (it's not like ISP's don't want more bandwidth) is the enormous costs of DS-3/OC-3 etc lines. While a 1.5/384 or 8/1megabit, etc line might run the customer $40 a month a single DS-3 in my neck of the woods (even if you are on the fiber loop and they don't have to charge you per mile runs) will easily run > $8,000 dollars a month depending on your service agreements, etc.

Re:That might sound fine

[ender81b]

I think the problem is that the system you described is it would be hard to implement. Currently, for both Cable and DSL, the circuits are provisioned at a set speed - at the DSLAM (for DSL) and at the Cable Modem for Cable. For your system to work you'd have to allow whatever provisioning you'd want at the DSLAM or Cable modem (whatever, 10mbps/6 mbps) and then run QoS controls on a router to traffic shape everything else. This would cost more - you'd have to invest in some beefier routers - and be harder to configure. You'd also run into the problem of what you consider local - is anybody in the state? The country?

Remember, most DSLAMS (and CTSMS for that matter) serve only a few hundred customers then are linked together by DS3's and what have you. It'd also be alot harder to ensure the right speed, Cable has a finite upload bandwith and two/three people on the same CTSM who were xferring gigs upon gigs of bandwith could kill a node. Same with DSL, though to a lesser extent.

It wouldn't be impossible, but you'd have to essentially redesign the entire system to make it work. Currently though most "tier 1" providers implement kindof the system you describe. For instance, one of our DS3's is through Sprint and any bandwith that stays on Sprint's network isn't counted against our Xfer costs.

Re:This is fully sick

[Neo-Rio-101]

All my folks back home are stuck on dial-up. The pricing is just not competitive enough to make them want to switch. They can get most of what they want done over dial up.
Local calls aren't timed either.
It has to happen eventually. My mother will go insane if my father keeps using her phone line for the PC.

------
halt
Whoops. I confused my laptop's terminal for the production mail server's.

Sliding Windows Re:Even if I had 20M...

[lazybeam]

You just need to tweak your TCP/IP stack. For a 10MB/s transfer over 300ms latency you need a 3MB TCP buffer (window). Most operating systems don't allow the buffer to grow that large.

RTFM

[pbjones]

8Mb is max based on distance, it drops to almost current ADSL speeds after a km or so. It has the same 4km reach as current ADSL, so for many people there is only a marginal speed gain, yawn, which still makes cable faster in most cases. Also at the mubpond was announced that Telstra was looking at equipment that will extend the reach of ADSL, potentialy to 12kms or more, and make ADSL viable in small towns etc.

Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Several problems that I can see offhand. First: data caps. Those that are most likely to be drawn to the higher speeds are also those that are most likely to be hit with shaping -- ie, dropping back to 64 kbps transfer rates. When the appeal is for 8000 kbps ... two orders of magnitude drop in transfer rates? Sheesh. (Understandable, though; they want to try to discourage leechers.)

Second problem: they're rolling the tech out in a limited number of exchanges. I'm on the Tally Ho exchange; that isn't on the list of exchanges to receive the tech (Victorian exchanges to date: Box Hill, Brunswick, Collingwood, Exhibition, Hawthorn, North Melbourne, Northcote, Richmond and South Melbourne, with Windsor and Lonsdale in progress.) Good luck trying to get it outside those exchanges.

This strikes me as being more of a marketing exercise than anything else. It'll take at least a year or more before it reaches even a reasonable proportion of the metropolitan population ... and then there's the rural users to worry about. To put this into perspective: Australia is the size of the forty-eight continental states, but has the population (roughly) of the state of New York. We're very sparsely populated, and much of this technology is geared towards densely populated areas...

Re:Even if I had 20M...

[darkewolf]

You do realise you can connect to multiple sites at once? I get around 760k/s max out of my DSL now. I tend to go to archive.org and download 3 or 4 creative commons movies down at once - each appears rate limited (by archive.org) at 130k/s - but all 4 come down at the same(ish) speed. Mind you, one or two International sites have given me 400-500k/s - just not often. But I like to be able to download whilst not affecting my VPN or other things.

Re:capped to 40GB/month

[Anonymous Coward]

no, no it is not.

it is 8Mbit/s.

No one in Australia is ever under the misaprehension that they have unlimited downloads, so they always look at both the speed and the download allowance, and therefore choose a plan that has the right combination of download size and speed.

Leechers are probably always better off with slower plans with larger allowances (and unlimited ones do exist at a lot of ISPs, but obviously cost a little more than capped ones), but the rest of us are quite happy to be able to download the occasional .iso in a few minutes.
We have better things to do with our time than spend all day, every day downloading DVDs we'll never watch.
40GB is more than enough for most mortal uses.

Complaining about caps simply DOES NOT APPLY to Australian broadband, because apart from the very early days when barely anyone used it and Telstra and Optus cable were the only way you were going to get it anyway, ISPs have always capped the plans, and always been very clear about the capping.

Re:Yay Australia

[sc0ob5]

You Have got to be kidding me.. Overpriced broadband in the states? sorry, did I read that right? I have been paying around $70us a month for 1.5mbit adsl..

It's about time we get decent broadband, too bad its from some no name company that no one has ever heard of.

Re:Yay Australia

[tooth]

Yet another country where data is not hindered

We've had telstra hindering our speeds for years, and we've been paying for it... iinet has worked around this by rolling out its own infrastructure. trust me, if you lived here or been following it a bit more closely you'd know how many australians envied the US... of course now we envy Hong Kong and Korea :)

Unfortunately, bandwidth costs in Australia...

[Meetch]

Being such a geographically sparse country, investment in infrastructure generally involves a lot more up-front cost than say, Sweden (most European countries come to think of it), per person. Think about it - driving approximately around the mainland coast would take about 10 days at a guess if you were pushing it, and there's only around 20 million people on it. That's a lot of man hours, cables and equipment to install. So don't expect cheap all-you-can-eat access in Australia yet.

There are various plans at various rates - one provider offers 512/128 for $70/month with no restrictions, not sure about the cost for higher peaks. I wouldn't look for any vast improvement over this sort of capped plan for at least another 5 years, and that's only assuming the standards don't improve the peak speed even further.

iiNet have spent $10M on installations, and only have customers numbering in the tens of thousands of dollars. They obviously can't give the service away, but the rates are still reasonable especially compared with the telco offerings. As I understand it, there are still per Mb costs from at least some of our international trunk providers too. Anyone who can refute that, or that has details?

Re:Unfortunately, bandwidth costs in Australia...

[Meetch]

Sweet spot? In Sydney and Melbourne, almost certainly. Perth however is 1.2 million or so people spread out over a couple of hundred square kilometres - and that's where iiNet was born. Adelaide's density wouldn't be much higher. Canberra, while designed well from conception is as a result mostly suburban for housing. And that's leaving out a few... submarine trunk to Tasmania anyone?

I believe many Australians are still dreaming of 180+ square metre homes on quarter acre blocks, and even if they don't get the desired space, that's keeping a large area of the lower density capital cities from building up instead of out.

Telcos are overcharging us (Telstra has to look after its shareholders after all), but they are also still installing infrastructure. It's fine installing the infrastructure for a city, but running a trunk over 3000km to the next nearest core hub is never going to be a cheap exercise, especially when we still get the cost of backhoe related outages adding to it.

Plus they have to keep upgrading capacity because people keep demanding more! And getting service to population centres off the beaten track does matter to the customers, and that adds to the cost, which is shared by all, whether we believe it's fair or not.

I find it refreshing to see ISPs installing their own infrastructure, but the costs are still there. At least call costs have generally come down since privatisation of the telco industry.

I'm still curious as to whether/how much Australian ISPs are still being charged by upstream (U.S.?) providers for volume. That certainly wouldn't help, though obviously those costs have at least gone down. Anyone?

I am with iiNet and on the new plans

[a.koepke]

I have just changed to the new plans and am getting about 7mbit connection. Loving the high speeds and the ability to download heaps and still surf the net without noticing.

There is also an error in the above summary
The only downside noted by Whirlpool readers is that iiNet is forcing customers to take their long distance phone service as well to get access to the 8Mbit/s speeds

iiNet are not forcing you to take their long distance phone service, you need to sign up with their complete phone service, not just long distance. My local calls and line rental charges are all through iiNet now, not just long distance.

Re:Yay Australia

[NightRain]

iiNet is the largest provider of ADSL behind Telstra and Optus, and soon to be the 3rd largest ISP overall. They don't do many TV ads I'll admit, but I don't know that "no one has ever heard of" is exactly accurate either :)

Re:only 256k up?

[gtoomey]

No. You get sdsl with the same modem as adsl.

The reason is that most ISP data centres run servers (lots of outbound, little inbound) and retail customers (lots of inbound, little outbound). This "evens out" bandwidth usage.

Re:capped to 5GB/month

[SlightOverdose]

The largest plan is 80gb/month.

iiNet usually upgrade the plans every 3 months or so, and the quota is quite often doubled each time.

Situation in France

[Seb C.]

In case anyone wonder, and since we did not have a slashdot article to promote this (but i don't care anyway), the frenchies can get an ADSL2+ (20Mb/s max), unlimited phone calls (mobile call for .19 cents () a minute -charged by second from the 1st second-) and TV through ADSL (when your close enough of the DSLAM) for 30 a month.
Sure, the country is not as wide as Australia (people are more concentrated), and only half the population is covered (others can get a 512k. the providers should yet reach 80% of the population by the end of 2005), but the broadband is getting quite common here.
For those who wonder, i'm 5km from the DSLAM, got a 61dB loss on my line, and still get 1,5kb down and 1kb up (phone service running fine, but no Tv)

This would be great except for

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that Michael Malone is the biggest arsehole in Perth (and thats saying alot) and iiNets infrastructure is a joke. This is a company that thinks running multiple Cisco 7200's at 90% load as their core routing is a good idea. This is the company who's boss forced everybody to a badly (I mean really) run Windows office infrastructure including the engineers because despite excellent arguments to the contrary could not ever admit he was wrong. This is a company who even a lot of the people still working there think is evil, it buys east coast businesses closes their offices then offers them jobs in the most boring and isolated city in the world (Perth) so they get stuck there and their wages can be lowered . This is the last sort of company you want to see become a bigger player in the Australian ISP market.