Why does Internet and telephony cost so much in Australia?
We have a Universal Service Obligation enforced by law which requires that access to communication services be equal in rural areas to high density cities. In a very large country with a very low population density, that increases the cost of providing the service.
We are geographically isolated. Undersea fibre links cost a lot of money to run and maintain. Why is this such a big deal? We predominatently want Internet content from other English-speaking countries. Asian countries have very cheap broadband because most of their bandwidth use is domestic (most content they want is locally hosted). Not so with Australia - we produce relatively little content, but consume loads of it (so we generally pay the majority of the cost of the link rather than sharing the cost with the other countries we peer with).
Domestic IP traffic costs even more to carry than international IP traffic. There isn't enough scale on the long-haul interstate fibre connections for the price to fall to reasonable levels.
Our biggest (49% privately owned) telco owns all the core infrastructure (exchanges, local loop, ADSL hardware), and are more interested in making a healthy profit than delivering affordable services.
If you can find a place to get one in your country (they're made in Australia, but available throughout the world), go for STM.
Their bags look good (and importantly unlike notebook bags so you're not a target for thieves), are very well constructed, and protect the laptop extremely well from any impacts. I've had 2 of them for years and both are as sturdy as the first day I bought them.
I've been running various combinations of hardware as a TV box for years now, but I've always had one problem: the TV output is crap. At the moment I'm using a NVidia GeForce2 MX with a Chrontel 7006 TV encoder chip, which essentially gives you 2 modes for TV out:
it's either too small (the image gets surrounded by that big pointless black border),
or it's too large, so I can't see the Gnome panel as it is outside the area displayed on the TV.
It only supports 640x480 or 800x600 modes, so no matter what settings you choose, the image is being scaled to the TV screen so any text ends up all blurry and illegible. I can capture in decent quality with a cheap BT878 card, but it ends up looking crap when I play it back on the TV.
So can anyone recommend a decent TV output card? Something which preferably doesn't rescale the image at all - just gives you PAL dimensions in the resolution the PC runs at, such that the pixels get mapped properly to the TV screen and the text ends up legible.
However, I do think bandwidth charges will kill p2p faster than anything else.
You're right this will be the downfall of P2P, but only international P2P - bandwidth caps will encourage localised P2P. International data costs, as the price of data reaches a more sustainable point, are the problem.
Almost all West Australian ISPs are connected to a peering point known as WAIX, and allow free unmetered traffic to it. The P2P hubs (DC and Edonkey) on WAIX are supposedly huge, and those in the eastern states on the iiNet are not insignificant in size. Queensland just got an IX called PIPE with free traffic for data passed through it. Really, it isn't as severe as the end of P2P, as long as you can find an ISP who are cool about local traffic. If bandwidth caps become predominant in other countries as they have here, expect it to happen.
The heavy users did complain bitterly when Telstra first put in data caps, but so many low usage users found it an improvement, as they ended up with cheaper access than before. The government competition watchdog thought it was an improvement as it let smaller ISPs who didn't own international backbones compete with the all-you-can-eat plans offered by Telstra/Optus.
Anyway, it isn't as bad as you make it out to be in your post. I live in Sydney and have iiNet ADSL, which has 12GB caps on a 512/128 link for AU$80. They shape you to 72kbps once you hit the cap, and they have a heap of unmetered internal content, including a few 128kbps Shoutcast streams and free P2P within your state. It puts the value you get from Telstra/Optus to shame.
i-green offer unlimited 256/64 for AU$80 too. Data caps aren't the end of the world - they just encourage competition in the market, and encourage ISPs to peer together to offer cheaper data to the customers.
Overclockers Australia have a guide to building a parallel port connected LCD screen for under A$25 (US$14ish). Doesn't look too hard (though some soldering required obviously). Unfortunately they only have info on controlling it from Win32.
"It's a fair cop role - not 'cop' as in an active cop, but we're prepared to work within the co-operative framework," Mr Chapman said. "We will not walk away from copyright piracy issues if it' s brought to our attention. It's a reactive but responsible role, not a proactive role."
They confirmed they will not be actively monitoring customer internet traffic. They're just handling complaints about their users, just like every other ISP already does. They are not scanning downloads for copyright violations as the article title suggests.
It's still broken, but they're redundant
on
When A Cable Dies
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· Score: 5
The Southern Cross Cable that was broken actually still isn't online - the original outage had no expected time of recovery, given the break occurred 34km off the coast of Sydney, where conditions over the weekend were up to 19m swells (oh, and normal recovery time is 20 days according to the SCC site).
The Southern Cross Cable is completely redundant, so they are justified in making their claims about uptime, but by some strange twist of fate, the second cable running out of Sydney was down for maintainance at the time of the break. The broken cable is still down, and they simply brought the second cable back up to fix everything. In any case, it didn't stop Internet connectivity for Australian users as some posters are suggesting; ISPs routed traffic onto other cable/satellite links, and while it was slower for users affected, it wasn't like Australia suddenly became broken off from the rest of the world.
If you're interested about how they lay and fix these types of cable out at sea, you should read this great article from Wired in 19996 by Neal Stephenson. It takes a while to read, but it covers everything from the development of the technology, to installing and maintaining it, how it's all linked up, and the economics behind it.
This Sydney Morning Herald article quotes a Telstra manager, confirming the logins were stolen from user systems with a trojan (after all, the Telstra authentication client stores them in plaintext), not from BigPond servers.
"BigPond has not been hacked. What has happened is a Trojan virus has been lodged on a number of BigPond users," Mr Gray said.... The virus had been found on the sites of the affected customers.
My BigPond Cable-connected system regularly gets portscanned by other cable/DSL users. This seems to be just a lot of FUD caused by the deceptions of script kiddie. Telstra don't do anything to protect their users systems from attack, but then how many other ISPs do?
Sub7 or some other "netbus" program has been used to leech the accounts of the users machines. This is at the moment the scenario I favour...
Sure, Telstra fucked up their ADSL network and extremely pissed off many users with their download caps, but there isn't proof yet that they screwed up on this too.
The current Liberal government in power don't understand technology, and have been making this evident for years in every piece of legislation relating to the Internet. They fail to consider the technological, privacy, or fair competition implications of anything they do. A few examples:
For what it's worth, even Microsoft realise they are hopeless. Hopefully they'll be voted out at the next election (probably later this year?), and this insanity will end.
You can find his office phone number from the web, but if you try calling it during the day, a friendly secretary will tell you he isn't working right now. However, if you call at 4am, the odds he'll answer are pretty good. Makes it difficult to find out what's going on when he ignores.org.au registration requests for 9 months...
Do you have a name for a company offering a product purporting it to be unlimited (even confirmed over the phone), users paying a substantial signup fee ($400), getting 1 month's unlimited service, then the service becoming restricted within absurd limitations? The words misleading and deceptive come to mind for me. This whole thing wouldn't sting nearly as much if Telstra would refund the signup fee.
I thought of essentially this idea a while ago, but there is a significant problem: power. GSM and similar mobile networks are designed to minimize transmission from the phone to the base station. The only communication between phone and cell when not in a call or receiving a message is to log onto the network and to send a location update every 2 hours (the time period is variable and set by the network). Other than those times, the phone never sends anything.
Why? It is takes a lot more power to send a signal than listen for one. Most new mobile phones nowadays can sit idle on the network for 5 days, but only stay on a call for 2 hours. While the power difference isn't spent entirely on transmitting (you also have to sample the audio, compress the data, time your transmissions on the network, and so on), a significant part of it is. Mobile networks are specifically designed to minimize the requirement for the phone to transmit, but instead very infrequently announcing "yeah, I'm still alive" to the nearby base stations. Given the amount of data you need to retransmit on a P2P network (and with redundancy to multiple peers to keep the data flowing if one node goes down or moves out of range unexpectedly), phones on a P2P mobile phone network would spend nearly their entire battery life resending other people's data streams. And then you have the problem of requiring gateways (centralised points, thus somewhat defeating the point of a distributed network) to communicate with devices outside the P2P network, or in another P2P cluster (on another continent, for instance), and how you pay for access to those gateways. And how you geographically locate the most appropriate peers to resend data to (GPS on every phone with location broadcast to peers?), and how it scales under load, and so on...
It's a cool idea in theory, but unfortunately it wouldn't be feasible in practice (I'm all for building public-owned networks, but I'm not prepared to have only a few hours battery life on my phone to facilitate this). Which is a shame, as it'd be cool to not have to pay mobile phone rates to talk to someone a few blocks away, and not have to rely on telcos with insufficient infrastructure.
We used DocsOPEN at my work, and spent a lot of money getting rid of it, and instead replacing it with iManage. Docs gave us endless problems with it's mess of legacy code, and caused a lot of inconvenience for laptops operating outside the network. We rolled out iManage to 2,000 systems and it's a far superior replacement.
A lot of people posting don't know what GSM is, or why it is good. It's a mobile telephony standard like CDMA or TDMA, and has some very decent sounding voice compression. It operates on 900 and 1900 MHz, and is widely used throughout Australasia and Europe. It operates similarly to other digital cellular networks, but cells tend to be much smaller than on other standards such as CDMA, making it more suited to metropolitan use. It is true GSM crypto was cracked, but if you need security for your conversation, you shouldn't be using wireless in the first place.
There is already GSM coverage over much of the US, but it is far from complete, and presents problems to international visitors, who cannot use global roaming on their dualband GSM phones. While not exclusive to GSM networks, SMS is an extremely useful facility (nine billion SMS were sent around the world in August) that many users of non-GSM networks often miss out on (you can send SMSes to phones from manywebsites for free). GSM ties in with the other popular acronyms at the moment - GPRS, WAP and Bluetooth (but not iMode - iMode is something specific to DoCoMo and their phones, while the rest of the world uses WAP).
A quote from a late-night Australian comedy show on during the Olympics seems relevant to ErikTheRed's post:
"...look, look, Australians, New Zealanders and Americans are friends under the one umbrella of ANZAS. The ANZAS pact. We've been in the trenches together over the years, we're very very good friends. The best friends we have in the world are the New Zealanders and the Americans. But I always say, HG, that friendship comes at a cost. And that cost is honesty. You've got to be honest to be a true friend. And while individually Americans are very enjoyable people, modest people, quite lovely people, individually they're very fine. It's just en masse... one can be slightly, I think, critical. They are loud, ignorant, self-obsessed, to the point or narcacissm. They are inward looking, baron, uninteresting, and incapable of seeing any of these qualities that puts the world against them wherever they go. They wonder why they are so disliked, they just can't see it, and that is their major stupidity, that the fatal flaw of Americans. Individually they are wonderful people, wonderful. It's just in toto, I mean get any more than 2, and I'm sorry."
While you're probably just trolling, and there will be many people more knowledgable on the matter than me, I'll go ahead and reply.
Rather than accept the fact that we came from the Garden of Eden as told in the Bible... Have any evidence to support that? The Big Bang theory looks fairly possible so far - evidence such as the distribution of elements formed in the universe tend to agree (although you could obviously have a long theological debate over evolution).
...they would rather believe that we were created in some big explosion in space halfway across the Universe! The technical community like logical explanations. Creationism does not look like a logical explanation (to me at least).
...then how did the galaxies form? As interstellar clouds of gas and dust drift around, they begin to gain sufficient mass to contract from graviational force, and a core forms. As matter is pulled toward the core, it gains kinetic energy and heats up. Convection currents keep the heat in, and fusion begins at 10^7K. This protostar can then evolve into the main sequence of stars. Galaxies can then form from large systems of stars being held together by mutual gravitational attraction.
...a patent absurdity to anyone who knows the real history of the world. Ahem. Troll.
The people at name.space have been trying at this for a while. Same with AlterNIC, but they ruined their reputation a while back. None of it is free, but preventing domain squatters going nuts is a good thing.
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Linus doesn't live in Sydney, so why should he own a PO Box in the centre of Sydney CBD?
Surely it is logical Linux Australia hold a PO Box for him. He certainly wouldn't have a physical mailing address in Australia.
And having said all that, it really isn't so bad now. 32GB/month 512/128 ADSL for US$60/month or 10GB/month 1500/256 ADSL for US$70/month. Sure there's loads of room for improvement, but we aren't the broadband backwater we were 2 years ago.
If you can find a place to get one in your country (they're made in Australia, but available throughout the world), go for STM.
Their bags look good (and importantly unlike notebook bags so you're not a target for thieves), are very well constructed, and protect the laptop extremely well from any impacts. I've had 2 of them for years and both are as sturdy as the first day I bought them.
Check them out: www.standardtm.com.au
- it's either too small (the image gets surrounded by that big pointless black border),
- or it's too large, so I can't see the Gnome panel as it is outside the area displayed on the TV.
It only supports 640x480 or 800x600 modes, so no matter what settings you choose, the image is being scaled to the TV screen so any text ends up all blurry and illegible. I can capture in decent quality with a cheap BT878 card, but it ends up looking crap when I play it back on the TV.So can anyone recommend a decent TV output card? Something which preferably doesn't rescale the image at all - just gives you PAL dimensions in the resolution the PC runs at, such that the pixels get mapped properly to the TV screen and the text ends up legible.
If you like Hahn Premium, you'll love the James Squire beers. In fact I think I'll go have one right now...
You're right this will be the downfall of P2P, but only international P2P - bandwidth caps will encourage localised P2P. International data costs, as the price of data reaches a more sustainable point, are the problem.
Almost all West Australian ISPs are connected to a peering point known as WAIX, and allow free unmetered traffic to it. The P2P hubs (DC and Edonkey) on WAIX are supposedly huge, and those in the eastern states on the iiNet are not insignificant in size. Queensland just got an IX called PIPE with free traffic for data passed through it. Really, it isn't as severe as the end of P2P, as long as you can find an ISP who are cool about local traffic. If bandwidth caps become predominant in other countries as they have here, expect it to happen.
Anyway, it isn't as bad as you make it out to be in your post. I live in Sydney and have iiNet ADSL, which has 12GB caps on a 512/128 link for AU$80. They shape you to 72kbps once you hit the cap, and they have a heap of unmetered internal content, including a few 128kbps Shoutcast streams and free P2P within your state. It puts the value you get from Telstra/Optus to shame.
i-green offer unlimited 256/64 for AU$80 too. Data caps aren't the end of the world - they just encourage competition in the market, and encourage ISPs to peer together to offer cheaper data to the customers.
Wired also have a good article from 1999 on the Nokia culture, as well as how they have affected Finland.
http://www.overclockers.com.au/techstuff/a_diy_lcd
They confirmed they will not be actively monitoring customer internet traffic. They're just handling complaints about their users, just like every other ISP already does. They are not scanning downloads for copyright violations as the article title suggests.
The Southern Cross Cable is completely redundant, so they are justified in making their claims about uptime, but by some strange twist of fate, the second cable running out of Sydney was down for maintainance at the time of the break. The broken cable is still down, and they simply brought the second cable back up to fix everything. In any case, it didn't stop Internet connectivity for Australian users as some posters are suggesting; ISPs routed traffic onto other cable/satellite links, and while it was slower for users affected, it wasn't like Australia suddenly became broken off from the rest of the world.
If you're interested about how they lay and fix these types of cable out at sea, you should read this great article from Wired in 19996 by Neal Stephenson. It takes a while to read, but it covers everything from the development of the technology, to installing and maintaining it, how it's all linked up, and the economics behind it.
My BigPond Cable-connected system regularly gets portscanned by other cable/DSL users. This seems to be just a lot of FUD caused by the deceptions of script kiddie. Telstra don't do anything to protect their users systems from attack, but then how many other ISPs do?
What? The site which originally broke the story (CORE) have now posted another article saying Telstra's servers were probably not cracked. Specifically:
Sub7 or some other "netbus" program has been used to leech the accounts of the users machines. This is at the moment the scenario I favour...
Sure, Telstra fucked up their ADSL network and extremely pissed off many users with their download caps, but there isn't proof yet that they screwed up on this too.
For what it's worth, even Microsoft realise they are hopeless. Hopefully they'll be voted out at the next election (probably later this year?), and this insanity will end.
You can find his office phone number from the web, but if you try calling it during the day, a friendly secretary will tell you he isn't working right now. However, if you call at 4am, the odds he'll answer are pretty good. Makes it difficult to find out what's going on when he ignores .org.au registration requests for 9 months...
Do you have a name for a company offering a product purporting it to be unlimited (even confirmed over the phone), users paying a substantial signup fee ($400), getting 1 month's unlimited service, then the service becoming restricted within absurd limitations? The words misleading and deceptive come to mind for me. This whole thing wouldn't sting nearly as much if Telstra would refund the signup fee.
Why? It is takes a lot more power to send a signal than listen for one. Most new mobile phones nowadays can sit idle on the network for 5 days, but only stay on a call for 2 hours. While the power difference isn't spent entirely on transmitting (you also have to sample the audio, compress the data, time your transmissions on the network, and so on), a significant part of it is. Mobile networks are specifically designed to minimize the requirement for the phone to transmit, but instead very infrequently announcing "yeah, I'm still alive" to the nearby base stations. Given the amount of data you need to retransmit on a P2P network (and with redundancy to multiple peers to keep the data flowing if one node goes down or moves out of range unexpectedly), phones on a P2P mobile phone network would spend nearly their entire battery life resending other people's data streams. And then you have the problem of requiring gateways (centralised points, thus somewhat defeating the point of a distributed network) to communicate with devices outside the P2P network, or in another P2P cluster (on another continent, for instance), and how you pay for access to those gateways. And how you geographically locate the most appropriate peers to resend data to (GPS on every phone with location broadcast to peers?), and how it scales under load, and so on...
It's a cool idea in theory, but unfortunately it wouldn't be feasible in practice (I'm all for building public-owned networks, but I'm not prepared to have only a few hours battery life on my phone to facilitate this). Which is a shame, as it'd be cool to not have to pay mobile phone rates to talk to someone a few blocks away, and not have to rely on telcos with insufficient infrastructure.
Just my $0.02...
There is already GSM coverage over much of the US, but it is far from complete, and presents problems to international visitors, who cannot use global roaming on their dualband GSM phones. While not exclusive to GSM networks, SMS is an extremely useful facility (nine billion SMS were sent around the world in August) that many users of non-GSM networks often miss out on (you can send SMSes to phones from many web sites for free). GSM ties in with the other popular acronyms at the moment - GPRS, WAP and Bluetooth (but not iMode - iMode is something specific to DoCoMo and their phones, while the rest of the world uses WAP).
There is more information on GSM at GSM World and the North American GSM Alliance.
"...look, look, Australians, New Zealanders and Americans are friends under the one umbrella of ANZAS. The ANZAS pact. We've been in the trenches together over the years, we're very very good friends. The best friends we have in the world are the New Zealanders and the Americans. But I always say, HG, that friendship comes at a cost. And that cost is honesty. You've got to be honest to be a true friend. And while individually Americans are very enjoyable people, modest people, quite lovely people, individually they're very fine. It's just en masse... one can be slightly, I think, critical. They are loud, ignorant, self-obsessed, to the point or narcacissm. They are inward looking, baron, uninteresting, and incapable of seeing any of these qualities that puts the world against them wherever they go. They wonder why they are so disliked, they just can't see it, and that is their major stupidity, that the fatal flaw of Americans. Individually they are wonderful people, wonderful. It's just in toto, I mean get any more than 2, and I'm sorry."
And now to watch my karma drop.
http://ns.soundhub.com/~wolvie/eazel_installer.jpg
I understand it doesn't support Red Hat 7.0, but how are we supposed to deal with new RPMs and Eazel at the same time under 6.2?
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/09/15/12392 47&cid=150 for the original comment.
Stephen Hawking: I call it a Hawking hole.
Fry: No fair, I saw it first!
Stephen Hawking: Who's the journal of quantum physics going to believe?
Rather than accept the fact that we came from the Garden of Eden as told in the Bible...
Have any evidence to support that? The Big Bang theory looks fairly possible so far - evidence such as the distribution of elements formed in the universe tend to agree (although you could obviously have a long theological debate over evolution).
The technical community like logical explanations. Creationism does not look like a logical explanation (to me at least).
As interstellar clouds of gas and dust drift around, they begin to gain sufficient mass to contract from graviational force, and a core forms. As matter is pulled toward the core, it gains kinetic energy and heats up. Convection currents keep the heat in, and fusion begins at 10^7K. This protostar can then evolve into the main sequence of stars. Galaxies can then form from large systems of stars being held together by mutual gravitational attraction.
Ahem. Troll.
The people at name.space have been trying at this for a while. Same with AlterNIC, but they ruined their reputation a while back. None of it is free, but preventing domain squatters going nuts is a good thing.