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.

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

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.

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

Uncle Dave

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!

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.

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.