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Going Postal over Bandwidth

By Nick Hodge | August 30, 2007

Arrrrrrrrgggghhhhhh!

I work online. I live online.

I am a cus­tomer of Inter­node (home ADSL, VoIP, via Tel­stra copper-wire) and Tel­stra NextG (USB card for remote work­ing). There are two Fox­tel digital units in my house. Host­ing for this web site is some­where in the US with Dream­host. My super­an­nu­ation fund is a minor Tel­stra round 3 share­holder. My cor­por­ate mobile phone is Tel­stra NextG; both voice and data services. 

The cur­rent argu­ments back and forth between Tel­stra and the “group-of-9″, the politi­cians who have “solved the band­width” prob­lem, ACCC and every­one else who is involved in this high-asset, high-customer-volume, highly com­pet­it­ive busi­ness; are start­ing to really piss me off. 

There I said it. Piss me off. Really piss me off. I am almost postal.

Today, I spent 4 hours upload­ing a video into the cor­por­ate cloud. I am attempt­ing to save some car­bon atoms from escap­ing into the atmo­sphere by doing what was once a poten­tial panacea: tele-commuting. Work­ing online. Earn­ing tax dol­lars by liv­ing in Australia.

Really, it shouldn’t take that long.

What is this FTTN (Fibre to the Node) thing any­way? I see no bene­fit to the end cus­tomer as noone is actu­ally put­ting a piece of fibre into each house. It seems to be a large charade to divert attention.

Where is the com­pet­i­tion? Where is my choice? Do any politi­cians actu­ally use the inter­net apart from watch­ing You­tubes of our little Prime Min­is­ter? Less reg­u­la­tion, more competition.

I once wanted politi­cians involved in ICT. Hav­ing spoken to some in the Lib­eral Party on this mat­ter a few years ago, their response was “join the line of issues regard­ing policy”

Now that they have become involved; only as there is a bal­an­cing act between the votes in the bush vs. the investors in Tel­stra: recent policies and invest­ments seem to have slowed innov­a­tion and com­pet­i­tion rather than improve services.

So, I regret my thoughts on want­ing politi­cians involved. Stay out of it. Let the mar­ket decide. Do some­thing use­ful and fix the hos­pit­als. KTHXBAI.

In the 19th and 20th Cen­tury rail­ways moved our gold, sil­ver, lead, wool and wheat from the pro­duct­ive farms and mines to our over­seas markets.

In the 21st Cen­tury, the two lines are not the iron lines 5ft 3in apart: they are the twis­ted cop­per pairs that con­nect our brains to the world. Brains, politi­cians. Not atoms. What is in our head is already more import­ant than atoms.

Instead of our bright­est minds tak­ing their brains and ideas to other parts of the world, we need to har­ness them here — and con­nect them to the world.

I don’t really care too much about the to-and-fro and polit­ical shen­angi­ans anymore.

Just open it up. Be brave. Let us all rise, includ­ing those rebadged PMGs, to a new world where the tyranny of dis­tance is slain.

Per­sonal Rant Over.

Topics: technology, telstra | 10 Comments »

10 Responses to “Going Postal over Bandwidth”

  1. TwoDogs Says:
    August 30th, 2007 at 7:45 pm

    Hear, hear! I hear you!
    I have a choice of one pro­vider, and they refuse to apo­lo­gise or com­pensate for incor­rectly shap­ing my ser­vice sev­eral times now.
    Give me com­pet­i­tion or give me… the crap I’m stuck with.

  2. Will Says:
    August 30th, 2007 at 8:21 pm

    (Per­sonal Dis­claimer — These views are not those of my employer)

    Hey Nick,

    The FTTN concept is that you’re bring­ing the DSLAM closer to the user. There­fore you’re more likely to get that ideal 24Mbit down­stream from your ADSL2+ con­nec­tion. Once you’ve got the DSLAM that close, you can also look at using VDSL2 in the future for much higher band­width (100Mbit @ 500m, 50Mbit @ 1000m). It’s also a step­ping stone to provid­ing Fibre to the Home even fur­ther down the track (replace DSLAMs with DWDM Optical Routers and splitters).

    The approach being pro­posed by Tel­stra would have made it very dif­fi­cult and expens­ive for com­pet­it­ors to provide their own DSLAMs using Telstra’s cop­per net­work.
    Depend­ing upon your point of view, that’s either a good thing (“Com­pet­it­ors should build their own net­work!”) or a ter­rible thing (“The Aus­tralian people owned the net­work until recently, we should be able to use whatever pro­vider we like”)

    I’m of the opin­ion that regard­less of how the net­work debate turns out — the hid­den issue is the cost of data.

    Even if we all magic­ally had 100Mbit eth­er­net con­nec­tions at home tomor­row, and only paid for data trans­ferred; Very few of us could afford to use it for those prom­ised high-bandwidth applic­a­tions — HD Video on Demand and such.

  3. hodgenick Says:
    August 30th, 2007 at 8:31 pm

    Will

    Thanks for the cla­ri­fic­a­tion. Cer­tainly made the FTTN debate a little more understandable.

    My think­ing is that com­pet­i­tion in the con­sumer end of the mar­ket should drive the price to the mar­ket price for band­width. Aus­tralia, due to its loc­a­tion in com­par­ison to “the world” will prob­ably make our band­width costs higher than com­par­at­ive markets.

    How­ever, we’re stalled at the gate.

    My rant isn’t aimed at any one party: gov­ern­ment, Tel­stra, G-9 or the vibe.

    It’s just an emo­tional rant.

  4. NathanaelB Says:
    August 30th, 2007 at 8:42 pm

    You’re right — the state of broad­band is akin to own­ing my now deceased 1985 Subaru Leone.

    I could no longer afford the risk to busi­ness of own­ing an unre­li­able piece of junk, so I upgraded to what I have now — a 2002 Mini Cooper S :-)

    How­ever in regards to con­nectiv­ity we have no such option; we’re stuck with the 1985 Subaru Leone.

    Don’t get me star­ted on iBurst — that has caused me some major grief in the past … it shouldn’t be legal to charge for that ser­vice it’s that unre­li­able. Don’t give me your crap about ser­vice range, weather con­di­tions … I paid for ******* wifi and I want ******* wifi; not this non­sense where I have to stand on the roof of my car and perch the laptop on my head to get dial-up speeds.

    Oh and don’t get my star­ted on Tel­stra GPRS either — that’s even worse!

  5. Dave - Lifekludger Says:
    August 30th, 2007 at 9:07 pm

    Sic ‘em Rex!

    I learnt long ago that tech­no­logy is never the prob­lem, policy is!

    Uncle Dave

  6. Ben Buchanan Says:
    August 30th, 2007 at 9:47 pm

    you’ll be unsur­prised to hear me cry “money is the root of evil!” ;) http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2006/12/money-is-choking-australias.html

  7. Will’s Blog - Broadband, Bandwidth, and Data Costs Says:
    September 1st, 2007 at 2:27 am

    […] Pos­ted in IT, Ran­dom­ness by Will on Septem­ber 1, 2007. Last night, Nick Hodge had a rant about slow broad­band, a lack of com­pet­i­tion and gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence in the whole mess. […]

  8. Richard Wilson Says:
    September 5th, 2007 at 3:56 pm

    I have just returned from liv­ing in Ams­ter­dam, the Neth­er­lands where I had a fibre optic con­nec­tion and unlim­ited band­width. Price dif­fer­ent­a­tion in NL was on speed not MB’s. Inter­est­ing altern­at­ive approach to broadband.

    I see inter­net as a neces­sary part of life and do not see how throt­tling or shap­ing is a neces­sary evil. Why not just buy some extra MB for the month rather than hav­ing to con­vert to a higher priced plan. I have seen the UNWIRED wire­less providor has this facil­ity. It is only pri­cing and what the cus­tomer and the sup­pli­ers think they can get away with.

  9. hodgenick Says:
    September 5th, 2007 at 7:37 pm

    Richard

    The lack of sup­pli­ers, and lack of a true free mar­ket due to polit­ical pres­sure has res­ul­ted in poor ser­vice for all Aus­trali­ans. To our det­ri­ment in this online century.

    It is little won­der that with the lack of VC fund­ing, server farms and band­width in this coun­try that the key star­tups leave.

    Nick

  10. Bronwen Zande Says:
    September 11th, 2007 at 12:17 pm

    Yeah..broadband sux…we have Tel­stra Cable, and Inter­node ASDL2 cause John and I have a vir­tual office and we can’t reli­able both be on skype..or have one on the VOIP engin phone and the other on skype or down­load­ing a big file. So we need inter­net each..and they have to be dif­fer­ent com­pan­ies cause noone sup­ports hav­ing 2 con­nec­tions at the same address!

    Need cable for the down­load (as exchange is so far away we get slow down­load from adsl2) and have the adsl2 so i can upload my pics etc at some­thing faster than 128k

    We also have nextg phones…but the data prices are stu­pidly expensive.

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