True - but this is only one ISP out of the hundreds that are available. Plus, the filter is very small in scope - nothing to do with the Australian Government, but rather maintained by Interpol, and purportedly blocks only child abuse content with ages less than 13 involved.
So, either you care about it enough to switch ISPs (which due to the forced wholesale laws in Australia, virtually everyone can do, and is a good idea anyway since Telstra usually aren't the best choice), or you don't care and you will continue along blissfully unaware that a handful of obscure domains which you were never going to visit anyway are unavailable. Or change your DNS servers.
Censorship is evil, but as far as it goes, this is really pretty minor. Same blacklist as already exists for many European countries/ISPs.
More expensive than Europe/UK, but less expensive than the US, is my assessment. I pay $20 AUD/month and get 1 GB data and more calls/SMS than I'd ever use...
Sorry, but Australia is the same size as the lower 48 US states, has 1/15th the population, and has cheaper rates, more carriers (at least 4 or 5 distinct actual networks, plus many resellers) and more competition in the mobile sector. Coverage on at least one of those providers (Telstra) is excellent even in very remote towns - plus they are one of the few networks in the world to have fully rolled out 21/42 Mbps HSDPA. The other carriers' coverage isn't as good, but they still cover the majority of the places people live.
Not saying it's perfect, but if you're going to make comparisons, Australia is a better one than Europe, since it's similarly huge, has the same Federal/State government structure, and has even less population than the US (although to be fair, that population is somewhat more centralised than in the US).
Why is number portability between cellular and fixed lines a useful thing? Genuine question - since I never really thought of a scenario in which I'd want that.
I live in Australia. Incoming calls/texts are free here. As you say, however, calling a mobile phone from a landline costs more than calling another landline. I suppose that's unfair in a way but I think the prices are cheap enough in this day and ages that it doesn't really matter. The person knows they are calling a landline because mobile phones all start with 04 and dont have one of the normal geographical area codes - it never made sense to me that US mobiles have an area code since they are, well, mobile, and could physically be located anywhere.
Anyway I can see the logic in your argument. It's not a perfect system. But at the end of the day, I can't escape the basic fact that to me, paying for incoming calls seems illogical - you are being charged for something you had no control over. Texts are even worse since you can't choose not to accept them like you can a call - they just arrive.
Yep I'd use Sprint in the US with no hesitation... IF they were a GSM carrier. Unfortunately I travel so my phone is GSM. I have SIM cards for 4 or 5 countries that I visit regularly and like having the single device that works everywhere.
This isn't an anti-CDMA/EVDO rant - it's a decent technology - but the reality is no one else uses it. Looking forward to the next iPhone which some people think might have a dual CDMA and GSM chip in it. That'd be sweet ( assuming it will let you use it on, say Sprint or Verizon in the US, and on GSM carriers elsewhere).
Yeah heh: "we're full, f*** off" is also a sentiment expressed by certain bumper stickers affixed to the cars of bogans (think: rednecks, but with more money) here in Australia.
To call either Australia or Canada 'full', having among the physically largest land areas and lowest population densities in the world, is rather hilarious.*
-- *Yes there may be environmental restraints on population (particularly Australia, being such a dry continent, will never have enough water to support a huge population), but to equate that with 'full' is a misnomer at best.
Nah not even that will happen. It's not a law. It's not 'Australia' blocking it. It's two out of the hundreds of ISPs (admittedly, big ones, but most people in Australia have a relatively wide choice of ISP cf. the US) doing it of their own making. So:
- People on ISPs other than those two (which includes anyone with half a clue about the Internet - these ISPs are essentially the 'clueless ma and pa' ISPs), won't be affected. - People on these ISPs who care enough about the issue will switch to another ISP. This is a relatively painless process - there is a very high rate of ISP 'churn' in Australia already as providers compete on price vs. download limit. - People on these ISPs who don't care (i.e. most of them) won't do anything.
Your 1-2-3-4 list would happen if this was a universal filtering that all ISPs were doing, but it's not. Thankfully.
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!)
Yeah - though at least in Australia there is (in most areas) a pretty wide choice of ISPs (and only two ISPs are doing this retarded voluntary filtering thing). But you'd be kinda screwed if you lived in an area (in whatever country) where you didn't have any other realistic choice of ISP ('desperate' options like relying solely on 3G and satellite notwithstanding)
- Internode; - iiNet; - TPG (well technically they have an unlimited plan - not available in all areas though)
That's three off the top of my head. There are plenty of others that may not have TB plans, but do have plans of 500GB and upwards, which is still pretty damn significant.
Please don't trot out this old myth again. This used to be the case, like, ten years ago, but not these days.
The main (largest design capacity) undersea cables out of Australia - SXC, AJC and PPC1 - are not operating anywhere near their maximum capacity. Just because your particular ISP may be too cheap to fork out money to buy more capacity ~on~ these cables does not mean that the capacity isn't there. Some ISPs do buy sufficient international capacity - and it shows in their performance benchmarks.
On top of this there are several new cables currently under construction, in anticipation of the NBN starting to increase international traffic within the next 5-10 years.
A good point. However the proportion of Australia where there wouldn't be any alternative is considerably less than the proportion of some countries that there wouldn't be an alternative. Due to the fact Telstra is forced to wholesale access to its phonelines, if you have a phone line, you can most likely get a different ISP. In ~most~ cases (though not all).
Of course chances are that that other ISP will just be resold Telstra Wholesale access, but that would still get you around the filter.
Er it's only two ISPs that have made a decision themselves to do this - not a law, and not something that affects 'Australia' as a whole. Easier to change to another ISP than to start talking about proxies and stuff...
Keep in mind this is just a private decision made by two particular ISPs. I don't really have a problem with that - can always change ISPs to one that doesn't do this, if I so desire. Most people simply won't care though.
Regarding the travel that's not true. I travel overseas quite regularly (multiple times per year) out of my own pocket, for personal reasons. And I did this even when I was a poor-ass student. I live in Australia - international travel is a very typical and normal thing for most people here (official statistics are that at any given point in time, 1 in 20 Australians are overseas, and 1 in 4 travel overseas at least once in any given calendar year).
PARTICULARLY in the US, money shouldn't be a huge impediment to travelling. You can travel abroad quite easily compared to here:
- You have much lower airfares compared to where I live (compare a Australia-US return flight price, on an airline's Australian site, with the exact same trip in reverse quoted from the same airline's US site - Americans typically pay almost HALF as much);
- Due to your higher population, you have a greater choice of airlines and routes;
- You are closer to a lot more places, meaning fares to anywhere in Europe, the Americas and even much of Asia are cheaper, and flight times significantly shorter.
Anyway - to bring this back onto topic: unlocked phones are the norm here and always have been. Locked phones are useless even if you don't travel, since you can't even switch domestic providers when you want (which people tend to do quite regularly here since the phone companies are always improving the value of their plans to compete with each other, particularly for data plans).
That's true, and for someone on a budget would be a very logical choice.
But don't forget that the iPhone 4 hardware is not just an iPod Touch with a cellular phone chip in it. The CPU and GPU are significantly more powerful. The iPhone 4 display is far superior. The battery (capacity, and life) is different. The iPhone has a proper GPS chip in it, the iPod Touch doesn't. And so on. So they aren't exactly equivalent solutions.
Saying it's like dialup is a bit harsh. It's better than dialup. GPRS is like dialup (64 kbps)... but T-Mobile has EDGE (so-called '2.5 G' data) that will work fine on the iPhone and gives several hundred kbps. That is not fast by any means but it beats the hell out of dialup and is perfectly usable for email, maps and other basic things like that.
I know because I have an iPhone 4 (bought unlocked from Apple) and I put a T-Mobile SIM in it whenever I visit the USA. EDGE data is quite usable, though nowhere near as fast as 3G at home obviously. But provided I'm not trying to stream video or something, it's fine.
Well if you have to pay $70/month you're absolutely right! But I think the hope here is that carriers will now start to offer SIM-only plans that don't include contracted payment instalments for a phone.
I have an iPhone 4 (bought outright/unlocked for close to $1000 USD) and I'm lucky if my bill is more than $15 in a heavy-use month. Under $10 quite a few months. Provided the phone lasts me 2 years or so, that works out cheaper than the 'cheap up-front phone but expensive contracted plan' options like the ones you mention. Plus I can put other SIMs in it when I travel.
Remember, those plan prices you are quoting ~include repayments for the subsidised phone you got when you signed up~. That is, you're paying the $700 for the phone either way - either up front (phone unlocked), or via a component of the monthly contracted plan charge (phone locked). Now that Apple is selling unlocked iPhones in the US like they do everywhere else, carriers will hopefully start offering plans without the built-in phone repayments. The prices will then begin to look a lot more reasonable.
I agree that you'd be completely nuts to buy an unlocked phone and then put it on a $70/month plan that's designed to include phone repayments. You'd be buying TWO iPhones over the course of the 24 month contract (but only getting one, of course!). The good thing about this announcement is that it should hopefully open the door for carriers to introduce SIM-only plans in the US like have always existed in every other country. We can hope, at least...:)
Actually, you're getting it cheaper than quite a few places.
iPhone 4 32 GB, no-carrier, unlocked from Apple Store is $999 AUD here. That's $1068 USD at today's exchange rate. So you guys are making a $200-300 saving.
Australia is one of the more expensive markets for Apple Store prices so perhaps that's not a fair comparison. But you are getting it cheaper than even places like Singapore which are traditionally quite cheap. I think the reason for this is that the US dollar is SO low right now that any US prices compared against prices elsewhere look ridiculously cheap. If you used a more average value for the USD over the last decade, your prices are on par. All up - it's a fair price.
I thought this was the normal way of memorising typed numbers. It's certainly the way I've always done it.
If you ask me to quote my bank card PIN, or the code on the security system at the office etc. or ask me to type them on a randomly ordered keypad (or the number keys across the top of a QWERTY keyboard), I will not be able to do it very easily. I would have to visualise a normal keypad, move my hand across it in my mind, then figure out which numbers I pressed.
That is to say, I know my various PINs only by the pattern of movement I have to make to enter it (e.g. up, down, across 2, diagonally down and left, enter). The actual numbers? No idea off the top of my head.
This was what was stopping me moving away from the default 4-number simple PIN. I thought that soon as I enabled complex passwords it'd give me the whole keyboard (hard to type on quickly with one hand). But yep if you keep it all-numeric it keeps the standard keypad. That's awesome, and allows me to increase my PIN to 8+ digits without making it harder to type.
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True - but this is only one ISP out of the hundreds that are available. Plus, the filter is very small in scope - nothing to do with the Australian Government, but rather maintained by Interpol, and purportedly blocks only child abuse content with ages less than 13 involved.
So, either you care about it enough to switch ISPs (which due to the forced wholesale laws in Australia, virtually everyone can do, and is a good idea anyway since Telstra usually aren't the best choice), or you don't care and you will continue along blissfully unaware that a handful of obscure domains which you were never going to visit anyway are unavailable. Or change your DNS servers.
Censorship is evil, but as far as it goes, this is really pretty minor. Same blacklist as already exists for many European countries/ISPs.
Nope - this doesn't affect Telstra Wholesale resellers. It's only if you are on actual Telstra Bigpond.
More expensive than Europe/UK, but less expensive than the US, is my assessment. I pay $20 AUD/month and get 1 GB data and more calls/SMS than I'd ever use...
Sorry, but Australia is the same size as the lower 48 US states, has 1/15th the population, and has cheaper rates, more carriers (at least 4 or 5 distinct actual networks, plus many resellers) and more competition in the mobile sector. Coverage on at least one of those providers (Telstra) is excellent even in very remote towns - plus they are one of the few networks in the world to have fully rolled out 21/42 Mbps HSDPA. The other carriers' coverage isn't as good, but they still cover the majority of the places people live.
Not saying it's perfect, but if you're going to make comparisons, Australia is a better one than Europe, since it's similarly huge, has the same Federal/State government structure, and has even less population than the US (although to be fair, that population is somewhat more centralised than in the US).
Why is number portability between cellular and fixed lines a useful thing? Genuine question - since I never really thought of a scenario in which I'd want that.
I live in Australia. Incoming calls/texts are free here. As you say, however, calling a mobile phone from a landline costs more than calling another landline. I suppose that's unfair in a way but I think the prices are cheap enough in this day and ages that it doesn't really matter. The person knows they are calling a landline because mobile phones all start with 04 and dont have one of the normal geographical area codes - it never made sense to me that US mobiles have an area code since they are, well, mobile, and could physically be located anywhere.
Anyway I can see the logic in your argument. It's not a perfect system. But at the end of the day, I can't escape the basic fact that to me, paying for incoming calls seems illogical - you are being charged for something you had no control over. Texts are even worse since you can't choose not to accept them like you can a call - they just arrive.
Yep I'd use Sprint in the US with no hesitation ... IF they were a GSM carrier. Unfortunately I travel so my phone is GSM. I have SIM cards for 4 or 5 countries that I visit regularly and like having the single device that works everywhere.
This isn't an anti-CDMA/EVDO rant - it's a decent technology - but the reality is no one else uses it. Looking forward to the next iPhone which some people think might have a dual CDMA and GSM chip in it. That'd be sweet ( assuming it will let you use it on, say Sprint or Verizon in the US, and on GSM carriers elsewhere).
Haha. Reminds me of this: http://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/can-you-read
Starts with 'C', ends in 'a', oh yeah I know that place - China :)
Yeah heh: "we're full, f*** off" is also a sentiment expressed by certain bumper stickers affixed to the cars of bogans (think: rednecks, but with more money) here in Australia.
To call either Australia or Canada 'full', having among the physically largest land areas and lowest population densities in the world, is rather hilarious.*
--
*Yes there may be environmental restraints on population (particularly Australia, being such a dry continent, will never have enough water to support a huge population), but to equate that with 'full' is a misnomer at best.
Nah not even that will happen. It's not a law. It's not 'Australia' blocking it. It's two out of the hundreds of ISPs (admittedly, big ones, but most people in Australia have a relatively wide choice of ISP cf. the US) doing it of their own making. So:
- People on ISPs other than those two (which includes anyone with half a clue about the Internet - these ISPs are essentially the 'clueless ma and pa' ISPs), won't be affected.
- People on these ISPs who care enough about the issue will switch to another ISP. This is a relatively painless process - there is a very high rate of ISP 'churn' in Australia already as providers compete on price vs. download limit.
- People on these ISPs who don't care (i.e. most of them) won't do anything.
Your 1-2-3-4 list would happen if this was a universal filtering that all ISPs were doing, but it's not. Thankfully.
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!)
Yeah - though at least in Australia there is (in most areas) a pretty wide choice of ISPs (and only two ISPs are doing this retarded voluntary filtering thing). But you'd be kinda screwed if you lived in an area (in whatever country) where you didn't have any other realistic choice of ISP ('desperate' options like relying solely on 3G and satellite notwithstanding)
- Internode;
- iiNet;
- TPG (well technically they have an unlimited plan - not available in all areas though)
That's three off the top of my head. There are plenty of others that may not have TB plans, but do have plans of 500GB and upwards, which is still pretty damn significant.
Please don't trot out this old myth again. This used to be the case, like, ten years ago, but not these days.
The main (largest design capacity) undersea cables out of Australia - SXC, AJC and PPC1 - are not operating anywhere near their maximum capacity. Just because your particular ISP may be too cheap to fork out money to buy more capacity ~on~ these cables does not mean that the capacity isn't there. Some ISPs do buy sufficient international capacity - and it shows in their performance benchmarks.
On top of this there are several new cables currently under construction, in anticipation of the NBN starting to increase international traffic within the next 5-10 years.
A good point. However the proportion of Australia where there wouldn't be any alternative is considerably less than the proportion of some countries that there wouldn't be an alternative. Due to the fact Telstra is forced to wholesale access to its phonelines, if you have a phone line, you can most likely get a different ISP. In ~most~ cases (though not all).
Of course chances are that that other ISP will just be resold Telstra Wholesale access, but that would still get you around the filter.
Er it's only two ISPs that have made a decision themselves to do this - not a law, and not something that affects 'Australia' as a whole. Easier to change to another ISP than to start talking about proxies and stuff...
Keep in mind this is just a private decision made by two particular ISPs. I don't really have a problem with that - can always change ISPs to one that doesn't do this, if I so desire. Most people simply won't care though.
Regarding the travel that's not true. I travel overseas quite regularly (multiple times per year) out of my own pocket, for personal reasons. And I did this even when I was a poor-ass student. I live in Australia - international travel is a very typical and normal thing for most people here (official statistics are that at any given point in time, 1 in 20 Australians are overseas, and 1 in 4 travel overseas at least once in any given calendar year).
PARTICULARLY in the US, money shouldn't be a huge impediment to travelling. You can travel abroad quite easily compared to here:
- You have much lower airfares compared to where I live (compare a Australia-US return flight price, on an airline's Australian site, with the exact same trip in reverse quoted from the same airline's US site - Americans typically pay almost HALF as much);
- Due to your higher population, you have a greater choice of airlines and routes;
- You are closer to a lot more places, meaning fares to anywhere in Europe, the Americas and even much of Asia are cheaper, and flight times significantly shorter.
Anyway - to bring this back onto topic: unlocked phones are the norm here and always have been. Locked phones are useless even if you don't travel, since you can't even switch domestic providers when you want (which people tend to do quite regularly here since the phone companies are always improving the value of their plans to compete with each other, particularly for data plans).
That's true, and for someone on a budget would be a very logical choice.
But don't forget that the iPhone 4 hardware is not just an iPod Touch with a cellular phone chip in it. The CPU and GPU are significantly more powerful. The iPhone 4 display is far superior. The battery (capacity, and life) is different. The iPhone has a proper GPS chip in it, the iPod Touch doesn't. And so on. So they aren't exactly equivalent solutions.
Saying it's like dialup is a bit harsh. It's better than dialup. GPRS is like dialup (64 kbps) ... but T-Mobile has EDGE (so-called '2.5 G' data) that will work fine on the iPhone and gives several hundred kbps. That is not fast by any means but it beats the hell out of dialup and is perfectly usable for email, maps and other basic things like that.
I know because I have an iPhone 4 (bought unlocked from Apple) and I put a T-Mobile SIM in it whenever I visit the USA. EDGE data is quite usable, though nowhere near as fast as 3G at home obviously. But provided I'm not trying to stream video or something, it's fine.
Well if you have to pay $70/month you're absolutely right! But I think the hope here is that carriers will now start to offer SIM-only plans that don't include contracted payment instalments for a phone.
I have an iPhone 4 (bought outright/unlocked for close to $1000 USD) and I'm lucky if my bill is more than $15 in a heavy-use month. Under $10 quite a few months. Provided the phone lasts me 2 years or so, that works out cheaper than the 'cheap up-front phone but expensive contracted plan' options like the ones you mention. Plus I can put other SIMs in it when I travel.
Remember, those plan prices you are quoting ~include repayments for the subsidised phone you got when you signed up~. That is, you're paying the $700 for the phone either way - either up front (phone unlocked), or via a component of the monthly contracted plan charge (phone locked). Now that Apple is selling unlocked iPhones in the US like they do everywhere else, carriers will hopefully start offering plans without the built-in phone repayments. The prices will then begin to look a lot more reasonable.
I agree that you'd be completely nuts to buy an unlocked phone and then put it on a $70/month plan that's designed to include phone repayments. You'd be buying TWO iPhones over the course of the 24 month contract (but only getting one, of course!). The good thing about this announcement is that it should hopefully open the door for carriers to introduce SIM-only plans in the US like have always existed in every other country. We can hope, at least... :)
Sorry! I replied to the wrong parent > My post is obviously not in reply to yours...
Actually, you're getting it cheaper than quite a few places.
iPhone 4 32 GB, no-carrier, unlocked from Apple Store is $999 AUD here. That's $1068 USD at today's exchange rate. So you guys are making a $200-300 saving.
Australia is one of the more expensive markets for Apple Store prices so perhaps that's not a fair comparison. But you are getting it cheaper than even places like Singapore which are traditionally quite cheap. I think the reason for this is that the US dollar is SO low right now that any US prices compared against prices elsewhere look ridiculously cheap. If you used a more average value for the USD over the last decade, your prices are on par. All up - it's a fair price.
I thought this was the normal way of memorising typed numbers. It's certainly the way I've always done it.
If you ask me to quote my bank card PIN, or the code on the security system at the office etc. or ask me to type them on a randomly ordered keypad (or the number keys across the top of a QWERTY keyboard), I will not be able to do it very easily. I would have to visualise a normal keypad, move my hand across it in my mind, then figure out which numbers I pressed.
That is to say, I know my various PINs only by the pattern of movement I have to make to enter it (e.g. up, down, across 2, diagonally down and left, enter). The actual numbers? No idea off the top of my head.
No idea. But something important clearly happened on 5 June 1983. :)
Wow ... so it does! Thank you good sir.
This was what was stopping me moving away from the default 4-number simple PIN. I thought that soon as I enabled complex passwords it'd give me the whole keyboard (hard to type on quickly with one hand). But yep if you keep it all-numeric it keeps the standard keypad. That's awesome, and allows me to increase my PIN to 8+ digits without making it harder to type.