arstechnica.com — Australia's government is backing an ambitious plan to build a new fiber-to-the-node network that will reach 98 percent of Australians and offer a minimum 12Mbps to all. But just how open will it be? Google has some thoughts.
Jul 2, 2008 View in Crawl 4
fairdinkummateJul 3, 2008
The National party was a part of the Howard government coalition that sold Telstra. The main reason broadband(& all other telecommunications) is uncompetitive in Australia is because this coalition sold the backbone of the system to their mates along with the majority telecom provider. If the Liberal/National coalition was true to its ideology it would have sold the backbone of the network separately, allowing that business to sell access to ALL providers at the same price, creating competition. Instead, they sold both retail & wholesale as one company & created a situation where this monopolistic company(Telstra) could charge whatever they wanted as a ' wholesale' price because they profited anyway. They then compounded this error by allowing this monopolistic provider to own 50% of their ONLY possible competition(FoxTEL(stra))!!!You can claim whatever political bulls**t you want but the bottom line is you voted for the party(ies) that created this mess!
askeggJul 3, 2008
I think what he means to say is Australia does not have the same population or distribution patterns of many other countries. We are the size of America with a total population equivalent to New York. This makes almost any communications infrastructure prohibitively expensive to install and maintain. There just aren't the people there to support the massive costs involved.What the government should do is say "f**k the bush". The Australian government has imposed restrictive rules which have altruistic intentions - provide high speed internet access to everyone in the country, no matter where they live. Where high speed services are not available, the government will kick in thousands of dollars per installation, effectively spreading the costs to all australians. f**k that.Free up the market and allow real competition. Highly populated areas will see a massive jump in speeds, quality, and price. Those in the country can still access the wireless and satellite networks being offered today - at realistic, sustainable rates without dipping into my pocket.
happytediumJul 3, 2008
Exactly, and at 12mbit minimum it still proves my point. I don't see what you're trying to say?
gthrankJul 3, 2008
It might be 12 Mbps within Australia, but the moments those packets have to make it from Australia to servers based in North America, it slows to a pathetic speed.
burnJul 4, 2008
Just voicing in with my f**k TELSTRA!
barc0deJul 4, 2008
The key words were "highly clustered":<a class="user" href="http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/drs/images/10/human_settlements/medium/hs05pop_growth_dist-map2.gif">http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publication ...</a>
ryvennJul 7, 2008
Australian net sucks ultra-donkey balls. Nothing else to it. They are cutting off ISDN and forcing all users on it to default to 3G wireless, which costs about $89 AUD a month and has about one tenth the download limit. (note, that's from 10gb at 128K to 1gb at 1.5mb). I have absolute faith that Australia will always be ruled by the greedy arseholes at Telstra. We will never ever see internet access even remotely rivaling the most borderline 'first world' nations.
ryvennJul 7, 2008
It won't be successful. They will charge us arms, legs and balls for access and have plans capping at 2gb of downloads. Never ever look to Australia to lead the way in anything concerning any kind of network.The telecommunications industry in Australia has the whole population thoroughly convinced that each extra 1 and 0 going through the line costs a company an extra dollar.To corporations, Australia is seen as a joke of a country, that's why we are continuously ripped off at every turn; be it hardware, software, games or internet access. The entire country is seen as the dumbass foreigner, charged extra for not being a local. The saddest part is that people put up with it. Being THE country of the continent means we have no easily accessible land neighbours to compare our living costs and standards with. International and even local companies take advantage of this.