Broadband - Australia

A Little Market Background

The Broadband Planet Wiki contains timely information about internet penetration in Australia.

Just a quick summary of the info:

Government Regulation

Heavy. Copper network owned by Telstra which is 51% government owned

Quick Facts

• Australia has 2 million households connected with broadband-class Internet connection
• 25% of all households in Australia have broadband connections
• There are 40,000 new broadband connections each month
• Of the new connections, 40% are with Telstra, the partly government-owned telco
• ADSL is the most common broadband medium while cable is avaliable in some major cities and sattelite connections in regional areas.

Australia has taken to the Internet faster per capita than any other nation so far. The only hardwired network in the country is controlled by Telstra, a partially-owned government telco. The fourth term Howard government is pushing hard to sell Telstra.

Telstra's reputation for service has not been stellar. Their cable service is often slow from over-subscription, and their ADSL has not been supported well. Their service department acts like it's part of the government -- which it is.

There are a lot of questions about whether deregulation, even with some hefty subsidies, will work.
Melbourne deregulated Connex, the metropolitan rail service, about three years ago. There were the usual promises to maintain the quality of service. This year, after cutting staff for three years to the point of endangering passenger safety and security, Connex threatened to shut down for lack of funds.
If the sale of Telstra goes the way of Connex, it could be worse than a terrorist attack for the 70% of the population on the southeastern seaboard. All of the hard wire-based services use Telstra's aging copper cabling.
iPrimus attempted to get a cable network going. It's been undersubscribed and the service has reflected the spotty budget.

I've been on Optus cable since I came to Australia. I've had very few outages and their service for phone, mobile, and cable has always been helpful and responsive.

ADSL is being sold everywhere you look. Every computer shop or telco shop has at least one offer in the window. Even Safeway will sell you a CD to connect. Predictably, the connections are poorly documented and serviced. One friend who has a small computer shop is called out to deal with at least one ADSL connection every week.

eLearning in the Outback Telstra has made political promises to upgrade and maintain service to the Outback and rural areas. The Howard government is publicly demanding that phone service be kept available to rural areas. The promises are exactly that: Promises. Even in relatively populated rural Victoria, the service is constantly criticized and spotty.
What it looks like to even a passing observer is that the government can see huge losses coming and wants out of Telstra.

The rural areas and Outback are where distance learning is needed most at all levels. These are areas still serviced by the famous Flying Doctor Service (another service that's going to be shut down soon because of funding.) Primary and secondary schools in these areas desperately need distance learning to maintain the quality of education. The stories appear in the papers every week or so.
It's not just telco services that are being sacrificed in the rural areas, medical and banking services are being lost to the cities, too.

If you do the numbers from the info above, the average Australian household has 2.3 members. (-- Yes, Australians are not replacing themselves.) That means that ADSL reaches 4.6 million of the just over 20 million population.

High bandwidth eLearning  Of the remaining 6 million households without broadband, many of them are also running outdated equipment. Powerful software like Elluminate! requires too long to download and too much computing power for about 65% of Australian households, no matter how they connect.

Money is literally poured into the schools for new equipment and software. The Brack's government in Victoria replaces the desktops and software every few months in Primary and Secondary public schools. It comes so fast that many of the teachers and administrators can't keep up their skills.
The technicians that service the school networks and equipment are underpaid, resulting in poor utilization of this expensive technology.

The Brack's government then spent millions on contracted training for school administrators, and some teachers. Unfortunately, they didn't allocate funds to cover the personnel while they completed the training requirements. The trainers simply came in, blew through the lessons leaving the staff bewildered, then left. The staff rarely had time to complete the three hours of practice the contract required. Result: Brack and his Dept of Education should have just taken the money and gone to the Bahamas for all the good it did.
The staffs were simply instructed to sign off on the paperwork as if they had completed the training time, then awarded certifications as if they had learned something. It looked good on paper anyway.

Even the Dept of Education is constantly changing simple functions like email. The underutilization of the Ed Dept email service is a public joke across Victoria. Account names, email servers, and passwords are changed without notice. Email accounts disappear, or are re-allocated space, capriciously.

About every 2-1/2 years, all the teachers are given expensive, powerful notebooks. Although it certainly makes them look impressive and professional, many hardly use their notebooks except when required in mandated professional development.

The real result is that the teachers and teachers' unions who should be in the vanguard to make distance learning available in rural areas are silent.

You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul. 
- Julie de Lespinasse.