Broadband still sucks, atleast in Australia.
16th February, 2006
Linux, Rants, WWW,
I have been on ADSL since November 2004, I guess it is time for me to talk about my thoughts on how the future of ADSL in Australia is shaping.
During this time, I have been with WestNet, on a 512/128 plan. This has suited me well most of the time, but there is often times when I want more download speed. This includes situations such as downloading Ubuntu's "Dapper Drake" Flight CD's for testing, or when I periodically <a href="http://gentoo-wiki.com/Advanced_Emerge_World">emerge world</a>
But most of the time my down speed is fine. However, it is usually my up speed that annoys me. Being limited to 128 kilobits (or 16 kilobytes) of upstream can be very disadvantaging when you wish to use SSH to connect to things at home. Often it can be quite slow in response, especially if I am utilising the ADSL line to do anything else.
It isn't just me who is getting feed up with things like this, it is anyway who uses depends on their broadband for either work, education or whatever other means.
Some Australian ISP's have started to roll out their own DSLAM's in an attempt to fix this situation, which is fine, but in many cases, the cost can be significantly dearer to go with these options, as there is additional cost of buying, installing and configuration of these DSLAM's by the ISP. But these options are better than what we have ATM, so I Commend ISPs such as Internode, TPG, Adam Internet and iiNet for doing so. If Telstra doesn't start to upgrade their network infrastructure, I will most likely being going with one of these companies. (For these who aren't in Australia, Telstra owns most of the ADSL infrastructure in Australia, and resells this to most ISPs, hence my ISP Westnet, relies on Telstra's infrastructure to be able to provide faster service).
A good question for Telstra at the moment is when are they going to start rolling out ADSL 2 capable DSLAM's into their infrastructure. Personally, I can't see Telstra being in a hurry to do this, especially since they have proven they don't want to share anymore. Oh and this is probably already proven by the fact that Telstra/Bigpond like to charge excessively high rates for their services, such as Bigpond ADSL, which is currently $29.95 a month for their cheapest plan, on 256/64. You are probably thinking this would be quite cheap for someone who is a light internet user, and it would be. But when you look at the fact it comes with only 200MB of quota and it costs 15 cents per megabyte after that (that's $150 per 1000 megabytes), it isn't that cheap at all, especially when my ISP, WestNet, for the equivalent price, you can get a 500MB plan, on the same speed. Not that much of a difference, but there are many more cheaper ISP's out there. Just check out this listing on Broadband Choice. So to summarise this little rant, I think it's easy enough to say that ADSL, in Australia, sucks.