Australia gets 17 Mbps broadband

AdLo said:
I think Steven White is going to reconsider comparing us with Australia.
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:D

I remember the moment at the ICASA hearings so well. He firstly said they cannot be compared to any other country, but he was then pushed for one or more countries which are similar to South Africa. Fast thinking was needed not to mess up completely, and Australia is a fairly safe bet because of their demographics (large country, far away from basically all Internet highways etc). But now it is coming back to haunt them, but I guess he could have picked the UK or Japan :D Not many countries worldwide which are behind SA!

Regards,

RPM
 
rpm - would you know what the average cost and cap size is for australia? and if they also have to pay for Line/DSL monthly/ISP and if not, what they have done to change - because this would be interesting facts to throw at ICASA against what Telkom has stated in the past and what they are screaming about the Draft regulations...
 
I must stop reading about broadband overseas it makes me depressed that we only have Hellkom .....
What is it like 17 meg a minute gee that is pretty fast.
 
LabAnimal said:
rpm - would you know what the average cost and cap size is for australia? and if they also have to pay for Line/DSL monthly/ISP and if not, what they have done to change
Click to expand...
I've just recently moved over to Aussie for the foreseeable future.
Having been involved in MyADSL, Australia's telecoms situation is an eye-opener. I plan to write a few blogs to this end in the next few weeks.

A few observations of the Aussie broadband scene:
- 17Mbps relates to an increase in cable broadband speeds.
ADSL is already available at 24Mbps in select areas (see http://www.iinet.net.au/broadband/).

- The choice of options is simply mind-blowing for a South African.
First you can choose between wireless, 3G, cable and DSL.
Then you have 30+ different providers with every kind of package available - speeds from 256k to 24Mbps, 400MB to unlimited size caps, some offer bundled phone and cable TV deals etc.
It took me a week of heavy research to figure out the best deal for my needs.

- Customer service is fast and good.
It took one call and two days to get a phone line connected once I'd decided who to use. My broadband was connected within 10 working days and it works well.

- Prices are still higher than UK and other countries, but compared to SA its broadband heaven.
I got a 1.5Mbps ADSL line with bundled phone service from Optus. Comes with 7GB peak hours cap and 21GB of off-peak cap with no port-shaping. If I hit my cap, the connection is throttled to 64k until next month.
Total cost of ADSL service is $49.95 + phone service line rental of $26.95 = $76.95 total cost (about R370). I was paying that for a 192k ADSL and phone rental without an ISP account.

Consider that a low earning Aussie can earn $10/hour, it becomes abundantly clear how cheap broadband is relative to earnings. To me that was the biggest problem in SA. Relative to a low income salary, a phone service is too expensive let alone broadband.

This is not meant to be a depressing post (although I know it will be to some), but rather indicative of what is really going on in one of Telkom's "peer countries".
 
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