As usual, Australian telcos are adopting standards quickly, only to offer them to customers (both business and private) at high enough prices to virtually guarantee no significant uptake.
Australia was one of the first countries in the world to launch a 3G network too (with H3G).
Ask any Australian how much they use their 3G or even GPRS mobiles for data access and you'll be hard-pressed to find a handful of people who are anything more than extremely casual users.
In a country where wired broadband is still charged by the megabyte on 200MB download/month plans (this is wired, NOT wireless!) and customers are penalised for downloading a single megabyte more, the launch of even faster wireless broadband seems like an ironic joke for Australia's internet users.
Read this article about Fraudband, a publication in the financial review commenting on the placing of Australia among the lowest developed nations in internet usage adoption.
12 month contracts and 200MB monthly download limits on 256kbits for what seems to be a cheap price but ONLY if you bundle it with a Telstra cellphone voice contract and Telstra landline... Oh dear!
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As usual, Australian telcos are adopting standards quickly, only to offer them to customers (both business and private) at high enough prices to virtually guarantee no significant uptake.
Australia was one of the first countries in the world to launch a 3G network too (with H3G).
Ask any Australian how much they use their 3G or even GPRS mobiles for data access and you'll be hard-pressed to find a handful of people who are anything more than extremely casual users.
In a country where wired broadband is still charged by the megabyte on 200MB download/month plans (this is wired, NOT wireless!) and customers are penalised for downloading a single megabyte more, the launch of even faster wireless broadband seems like an ironic joke for Australia's internet users.
Read this article about Fraudband, a publication in the financial review commenting on the placing of Australia among the lowest developed nations in internet usage adoption.
http://kalimna.blogspot.com/2006/04/fraudband_10.html
This country has problems and none of them are related to wireless.
It's the Telcos as well as the passive attitude of the australian people towards this ongoing issue, that needs serious fixing.
Then again, with such nice weather, who can blame them for not worrying too much about the internet? :-)
P.S. Since you mentioned Telstra, just read those ridiculous terms and conditions of the same company on their wired ADSL broadband packages...
http://tinyurl.com/hhyj9
12 month contracts and 200MB monthly download limits on 256kbits for what seems to be a cheap price but ONLY if you bundle it with a Telstra cellphone voice contract and Telstra landline... Oh dear!