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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/.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.