The standing point is that there are a few ISP's in Australia that can and do run, for the most part, unaffected, when these major cables have issues. The (diverse) capacity _is_ available and there's plenty more in the pipeline..
You get what you pay for - especially in this business.
I think you've summed your post up with the title; Huh?
Let's start with a few facts.. There is no real operational cable coming out of brisbane. The two major east coast cables are the SXC (two cables, both land on different sides of the city of sydney, one goes via NZ to Hawaii the other goes via Fiji) and the AJC, again out of sydney this time going to Japan via Guam.
The west coast has an older, but still somewhat utilised setup (SEA-ME-WE3).
As for your (far inflated) figures, where exactly did you pull these from? Australia currently has a population in the order of 20-22million, how the fsck are there ever going to be 90million internet users in the country?
There was an issue, almost similar (albeit, less dramatic) than the FUD you're spreading late last year [infact, i recall two or three] - the SXC was broken over on the US mainland, which affected our connectivity to their west coast. The problem here isn't the cables, it's the fact that most (read: most, not all - there are a few decent ones out there, if you know anything about the industry in this country you'll know who they are) ISP's in this country run their lines far oversubscribed and barely pull it off under normal circumstances. Had they had two or more circuits, either one across each SXC link or 1x SXC + 1x AJC running at 50% capacity or lower, the problems would have been greatly reducted. Likewise, if they had a single _protected_ SXC circuit.
I don't think the cables are the underlying problem. Sure we can talk the economics of undersea lines and how it would be cheaper if there were more, blah blah blah - but when it comes down to it, the _protected_ capacity is available out of this country. It's expensive, but hey, it's not like you enter the industry here not realising that to be a real deal you're going to need undersea capacity, or maybe that's too tricky to figure out?
Add to the fact you've got PIPE commited to building a similar cable to the AJC (quite possibly with a few other landing points - the gold coast has been mentioned, maybe that's where you got brisbane from?) Telstra talking about building their own cable similar to the SXC and a bit of chatter about other cables coming out of Perth through to western asia, etc and it's definately not the lack of cables coming out of the country. It's the cheap, profiteering ISP's (read: GOF) that don't seem to give a fsck about having a real network or providing a quality service.
Slashdot Mirror
*bzzzzt* sorry pal...
you're assuming nobody follows rfc1912.
also, what happens when the (ridiculously configured) host you're trying to browse goes to do a reverse lookup on your address?
Fair call, my mistake..
The standing point is that there are a few ISP's in Australia that can and do run, for the most part, unaffected, when these major cables have issues. The (diverse) capacity _is_ available and there's plenty more in the pipeline..
You get what you pay for - especially in this business.
I think you've summed your post up with the title; Huh?
Let's start with a few facts.. There is no real operational cable coming out of brisbane. The two major east coast cables are the SXC (two cables, both land on different sides of the city of sydney, one goes via NZ to Hawaii the other goes via Fiji) and the AJC, again out of sydney this time going to Japan via Guam.
The west coast has an older, but still somewhat utilised setup (SEA-ME-WE3).
As for your (far inflated) figures, where exactly did you pull these from? Australia currently has a population in the order of 20-22million, how the fsck are there ever going to be 90million internet users in the country?
There was an issue, almost similar (albeit, less dramatic) than the FUD you're spreading late last year [infact, i recall two or three] - the SXC was broken over on the US mainland, which affected our connectivity to their west coast. The problem here isn't the cables, it's the fact that most (read: most, not all - there are a few decent ones out there, if you know anything about the industry in this country you'll know who they are) ISP's in this country run their lines far oversubscribed and barely pull it off under normal circumstances. Had they had two or more circuits, either one across each SXC link or 1x SXC + 1x AJC running at 50% capacity or lower, the problems would have been greatly reducted. Likewise, if they had a single _protected_ SXC circuit.
I don't think the cables are the underlying problem. Sure we can talk the economics of undersea lines and how it would be cheaper if there were more, blah blah blah - but when it comes down to it, the _protected_ capacity is available out of this country. It's expensive, but hey, it's not like you enter the industry here not realising that to be a real deal you're going to need undersea capacity, or maybe that's too tricky to figure out?
Add to the fact you've got PIPE commited to building a similar cable to the AJC (quite possibly with a few other landing points - the gold coast has been mentioned, maybe that's where you got brisbane from?) Telstra talking about building their own cable similar to the SXC and a bit of chatter about other cables coming out of Perth through to western asia, etc and it's definately not the lack of cables coming out of the country. It's the cheap, profiteering ISP's (read: GOF) that don't seem to give a fsck about having a real network or providing a quality service.
Btw, you can actually find out what you're talking about: http://www.ajcable.com/ http://www.southerncrosscables.com/public/Network/default.cfm http://www.smw3.com/