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Australian ISPs To Start Filtering the Internet
daria42 writes "Australia's controversial mandatory internet filtering scheme may be on the backburner for now, but that doesn't mean it's gone entirely. In the next month, the country's two largest ISPs, Telstra and Optus, will start voluntarily filtering users' connections for a list of URLs containing child pornography. The only thing is, the users themselves don't seem to have much choice in the matter — and as the Electronic Freedom Foundation points out — there are no avenues for appeal for those websites which may feel they've been unfairly blocked."
Like seriously it's almost on the same page WTF Editors!
Maybe the editors are in Australia and the previous story was censored there ?
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Is Australia really so fortunate that the users have the ability to switch?.
Sort of. The local copper loop to the home is generally owned by Telstra, but the federal government mandates that they must lease access to other service providers. The price is fixed and both sides complain more or less continually that it is either too high or too low. My internet service comes from comcen through telstra wires which must be 30 or 40 years old. Optus and Telstra both have co-axial cable to many homes but the cable services are more expensive than ADSL through copper, possibly due to there being less competition and regulation.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Dual American and Australian citizen here with houses in both countries, so I have some knowledge about this.
In general, yes, Australia is that fortunate. Note that I say 'in general' - there will no doubt be some indignant person in Australia that replies to this and says "I can only get Telstra". But if you live in the major cities that contain ~90% of Australia's population, and you have a phone line, you almost always have a choice of anywhere between half a dozen, and 20+ ISPs. The reason for this is that, although Telstra owns the last-mile copper phone lines to people's houses, they are mandated by law that they must wholesale access to that infrastructure to any other ISP who wants it. Thus, most people DO have a fairly wide choice of available ISPs (some may simply be reselling Telstra's access, but that's good enough if your aim is simply to change to an ISP that doesn't do this filtering).
There are a lot of things wrong with the state of broadband in Australia: slow speeds due to aging infrastructure, congestion due to underinvestment in backhaul and wide deployment of RIMs during the 90s (which are fine for lines used for voice/dialup, but block xDSL connections) etc. Restrictive download caps also used to be a problem, though now you can affordably get multi-hundred-GB caps and some ISPs are offering 1TB+ per month, so I think caps are quickly becoming a non-issue. BUT - ~choice~ of ISP is generally, one thing that is far better in Australia than in the US.
Comparison: my place in the US and my place in Australia are both in small-mid sized cities, roughly comparable in population. I have a choice of over 20 ADSL2+ (up to 24 Mbps) ISPs at my place in Australia. In the US I have a choice of precisely 1 DSL provider, and at only 6 Mbps! (AT&T). There is also a choice of precisely 1 cable provider (which, although faster than the US DSL connection, is only roughly as fast as the ADSL2+ connection I have in Australia and costs almost 3 times as much).
So yeah, basically, Australian internet is screwed up in many, many ways. But choice and speeds are, on average, better than in the US. (Unless you are lucky enough to be in a FiOS enabled area in the US ... wish i was!)
Also, for those of us not on a wired connection, Telstra mostly offers far better mobile connections to rural and remote areas which are prohibitively expensive to connect with DSL or cable. The trouble with Australia is that a disproportionately large proportion of the population lives in only half a dozen cities, so if you opt to live out of the main stream, you also have to live with the fact that the telcos will just pass you by. Internode fills a lot of gaps (very well indeed), but even they struggle when there isn't even a phone pole within 5 km of your property.