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99% of Australians With Broadband By 2009?
Recently a study of broadband penetration rates around the world was in the news, because the US has fallen to 24th place worldwide, at 53%. Now comes word that the Australian Prime Minister has announced a $1.68 billion (US) plan to move Australia to 99% penetration within two years. If they accomplish this goal they will be the most-wired nation (South Korea currently occupies the top spot with 90%). The Prime Minister's plan was attacked by his political opponents because it would create a two-tier system with the country's vast (and almost empty) interior served by wireless at "only" 12 Mbps.
99% looks great on paper but is most likely political vapour ware (or even worse not a core promise)
The Australian Government has allowed the Telstra monopoly to restrict ADSL broadband in this country to an artificial limit of 1.5Mbit downloads for years now (only just releasing the full 8M plans). We also have restricted downloads (quotas per month).
So the metric of 99% looks like we would be miles ahead but considering it is a political promise and the quota on downloads it isn't as good as it sounds.
Why is the Sydney Morning Herald running an AFP report on an important Australian issue? The report's badly written, misspells the name of one of the two major political parties in Australia and measures costs in US$...
For the record, much more accurate and informative news on Australian Broadband can be found at Whirlpool at http://whirlpool.net.au/.
Not only that, the government is proposing WiMax for rural areas. Labor may be spending a bit more, but at least fibre is a tried, tested and reliable technology.
I live in a very well populated part of regional Australia. I can barely get DSL at 1500/256 and I pay through the nose for it.
The state of Australian telecoms is utterly shameful and no amount of empty promises by this clusterfuck is going to change things.
Actually, the opposition is FTTN for everywhere funded by government money as an investment. (expensive outlay, good return)
The govt's plan is FTTN in the cities funded by the private sector (as they're profitable), and a mish-mash of ADSL2+ and WiMax in the country, in other words outdated and unproven junk. (inexpensive, zero return, no future)
Gee, no wonder it's so cheap.
The current Australian PM has a history of announcing shit like this, allocating X billion dollars to it, with no results a year later. This is the guy who invented the phrase "non-core promise", from the same administration that spent 12 million buying every family a copy of net nannying software. Australians will take this announcement with a Liberal amount of salt (pun intended).
Internet access in Australia seems similar to the US horror stories posted here. All exchanges are owned by Telstra, a company created when the telephone system was privatized. They charge each ISP a rental of around AU$30-50 for each ADSL line, which pushes up the cost of casual user low quota plans. Most people can't get anything faster than 1500K, and dialup is the best available in rural areas. Cable providers are few, come with anal restrictions (e.g. you aren't allowed to run servers), and have limited coverage even in urban areas. The government was subsidizing new ADSL2 DSLAMs, but they canceled that program earlier this year, so the only ADSL2 coverage is in capital cities.
Whirlpool is a good place to look if you want more background on the state of broadband down here.
"The Liberal Party doesn't seem so liberal"
The Liberal Party (a conservative party) in Australia is big "L" Liberal not small "l" liberal.
Therefore your subject line I perceive to be a non sequitur.
codemonkey dotsrc org / blog
How does FTTN help people on farms? I spent a few years designing telephony systems for rural areas in Australia, and many, many of them have their phone line over wireless links. There is no cabling out there at all. The only way they are going to get broadband is via some sort of wireless.
The summary is completely incorrect. They're not aiming for 99% to actually *have* a broadband connection, they're aiming for broadband to be *available* to 99% of the population. So 99% will be able to get broadband, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll all get it.
Further to this, they're focusing broadband roll-out on marginally-held seats (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/06/19/195 5664.htm) - if that doesn't highlight what a cynical election ploy this is I don't know what will.
It is a bare faced election lie which will be dismissed later as not being a "core promise". My workplace has to rely on a 512/512 DSL connections because they are the best available 15km from the centre of a state capital - and those two lines are expensive - that has been the state of Australian broadband in many areas for the last decade. Communications in Australia have stagnated for a decade while the government has been arguing about selling off all the infrastucture at bargain prices and finding the worst of US management to run the decaying mass of it.
how is the Labor Party's proposal more workable? they want cables run to everywhere? liberals at least acknowledge that is economically moronic and want wireless to much of the country.
I live in Dianella, a central suburb of Perth, Western Australia. The most isolated capital city on Earth. I have 2, count 'em two, DSL2 lines in my *house*. one 24mbit (iiNet) and one 8mbit (Westnet). I get about 16mb and 6mb respectively, for the speeds. Oh, it's rock solid btw. Probably less than a day downtime, combined, over the last 3 years.
All these people complaining we have no infrstructure wake up and look at options other than Telstra. iiNet's had 24mbit DSL for years, guys...
As for the costs, well i get a 40GB limit on each per month, which is ample and I charge one single company some money a month to host their offsite backups with me... and I run it at a profit...
Just a few pointers: The coalition isn't getting 'thrashed in the polls' anymore it seems. The truth of the matter is that Kevin Rudd's broadband plan is insane. Firstly, before any of this started, OPEL were designing a submission for infrastructure investment for the national broadband network. They had already invested hundreds of millions of dollars and were planning to invest a couple of billion. If Labor's plan goes ahead they'll loose all of that because the government will be doing it all themselves (and we all know how efficient state owned organizations are). Secondly, they plan to take the money from the future fund. A fund which was setup using mostly the proceeds from the sale of Telstra (more about that later) to handle the massive increase in super payouts caused by the large public servant retiring population in the next 5 to 10 years. This problem was compounded by the super contribution bonus's setup by this government, to encourage people to contribute to their own super fund. Using this fund to invest in a broadband network will NOT have the economic return needed to handle the super payouts. No where near. I agree with you about the PM's understanding of the internet and its importance. This certainly wasn't helped by the previous IT Minister, Senator Richard Alston. Labeled as the worlds biggest luddite. I have been following and using broadband in Australia since 1994, and Telstra has been slothful, monopolizing barstard company since before then. Since privatisation, it has become more competitive, but there's still a long way to go. I don't think splitting the company into smaller ones would have solved the problem because we just don't have the same market as the US did. What was considered was splitting Telstra wholesale and Telstra retail, but that was shelved, and I'm not sure why.
Actually 256kbps (yes, you read KILOBITS/SEC correctly) is considered broadband. And that's only download. 64kbps upload is acceptable to be considered broadband.
Then South Korea is already pretty much at 99% - nationwide HSDPA networks have been fully deployed SEPARATELY by two carriers (yeah, it's an overinvestment) last March (KTF) and last May (SKT). If you have a capable handset, you'll get 3.6Mbit service from pretty much anywhere in the country. I've surfed internet from top of the mountains this way for a while.
Serving time in Aristotelean prison for violating laws of physics
Being reamed anally to the tune of $170 a month for 12mbps down, 2mbps up, with 90GB a month of downloads before being capped to 128kbps. Now THAT is "broadband penetration" and it hurts.
Spot on.
Here's a map of the world's undersea communications cables. Notice the massive of connections out of the US, particular between US and Europe. It's practically a single line. Now look at Australia. The larger two going between Australia and the US is the Southern Cross Cable. The other major cable is the Australia-Japan Cable. The rest are low-capacity links used primarily as back-ups.
Just to clarify, Optus is a part of two groups: (By the use of the word "consortium" I'm guessing you you might be confusing the two.)
The G9 has been working on a fully fledged FTTN plan for some time. The OPEL announcement was a bit of a surprise - the fact Optus/Elders were working on this plan wasn't really known, so whether Optus is still working on another larger plan with the G9, who knows.
- Chuq
Slight problem, we don't have a competitive market based model. What we have is an 800kg gorilla in the shape of the previously state run telco sitting on a tonne of dark fibre as well as the existing network saying that unless the government lets them price their competition out of existance for access to their network, they're just going to do nothing.
This report had me running to my bookshelf to extract my copy of the December 1994 Networking Australia's Future: The Final Report of the Broadband Services Expert Group, one of the flagship efforts of the final term of the Keating government. (I was responsible for a commissioned sub-report on future demand for broadband in education, so what happened next cuts deep.)
Fifteen months on, well before the long term thinking that had dominated Keating's too-brief reign had any chance to become entrenched, our electorate decided it was finally time to give then recidivist opposition leader Howard "his turn"
Then Howard installed his despicable power-broking deputy senate leader Alston in a mega department of Communications, Information Technology and The Arts, reportedly because the now high commissioner to London had at some stage expressed an appreciation of "The Arts" and that became the tail, reviving its long diminished role in film classification, which wagged the IT&C dog right through the boom and bust
Even worse, the Howard regime, ever blinded by a pathological hatred of its opposition, pigeon holed all the long term policy work that Keating had bank rolled. Even Tweedle Beasley didn't let go of the idea that we should continue to build on the impressive export education industry built during the Hawke-Keating years rather than profit skim it to a degree that even the worst of the private equity players must envy.
Others here are right that better pipes to the rest of the world have always been the core issue and that Telstra is afflicted by an even worse case of monopoly culture than Qantas or M$, but that culture problem the market will eventually sort out, unlike broadband access which our vast distances make potentially even more valuable than anywhere else.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I was pretty sure she said "gigabit" too - but the transcript said "gigabyte", so I went with that. I wasn't going to feck around with the whole video thing just to embarass the dopey cow even further.
And, sorry, it still makes no sense even in context - it's either conflating two totally different things (power vs bandwidth), or showing a basic lack of understanding of the very 'initiative' she's promoting. Read the rest of the transcript, or watch the video - it's clear that she's got no idea of what she's talking about and is just winging it from poorly-remembered briefing notes.
Look, I'd dearly love to believe the woman was a decent politician with a clue. I actually thought she might be one, particularly compared to the last couple we've had (Alston, for example, was just an arrogant arsehole). But, having read pretty much all the transcripts of Senate estimates committees related to her portfolio since she got the job, and seen the absolute feck-up she and her government have made of DTV and media legislation in this country, I've come to the conclusion that she's just arrogant and clueless about the actual practicalities of her portfolio.
I don't agree she's got a better grasp of it than Alston - at best, you can only say she presents better than he did (which isn't saying much). And she delegates the attack-dog role to someone else - Senator Fierravanti-Wells.
I've actually had some correspondance with her opposition counterpart, Senator Conroy. And while I'm not naive enough to believe that he has a clue either, at least his staff and advisors do (from the quality and intelligence of their replies). He certainly displays a better knowledge and understanding of the issues involved in the portfolio - ignore the press releases, soundbites, and electioneering; go and read the estimates committee transcripts and Senate Hansard to find out for yourself.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
We created a privatized monopoly(Telia) which by combining bureaucracy and greed to almost totally halted the development of broadband services in Sweden.
It is actually just in the last 4 or 5 years the market has got going, as Telia's perks slowly eroded.
And not until this year Telia lost all parts of it's monopoly, now forced to let others in on the action.
Baboons are cute.
How does an election promise make it onto the front page of Slashdot? Are publicists for the PM of Australia so good that they can get his hollow election promises broadcast into completely unrelated media? Pork barreling is not news.
Oh and on topic... Internet access in Australia is abysmal. My work sometimes takes me back to Australia and its like going to a third world country. In most of Asia Internet access is simple and no one uses modems. In Australia using a modem is normal. My brother good 2Mbps broadband in the back woods of Thailand yesterday and it took 2 days to be installed. I had to get a 2Mbps business Internet connection installed in Singapore. Took 5 working days for the DLC and was pretty cheap - they wanted to install ELL but the cabling up the riser to the basement distribution would take 14 working days and I had time constraints - that would have been cheaper than the DLC. ($850 install and $1200 per month).
At the same time I also had to get a 2Mbps connection installed in the Sydney CBD. What a nightmare. Jumping through hoops, waiting (and waiting) for Telstra. Then they charged $20,000 for the installation and $5,000 per month for access. And took 21 working days to install the circuit. This is in an already wired building in the main street of the biggest city in Australia.
The ONLY reason Howard has said anything about broadband is that it is entirely unacceptable in Australia for both home users and businesses. The opposition has made this an election issue so Howard has made promises knowing that follow through if he is returned to power really doesn't matter as it won't be one of his core* promises.
*For those of you not up to speed on Australian electioneering. Howard coined the phrase "core promises" to describe anything he promised during an election campaign and had some intent of following through - every other promise is a lie which was made with zero intent of ever acting upon. Is broadband a core promise? I'll let history decide.