FTTG
Fibre to the Ger.
There are, it seems, 44 countries in the world with better broadband download speeds than Australia, according to the latest Netindex release by Ookla. This has brought a predictable round of soul-searching, particularly as Mongolia appears higher on the list than Australia (it scored an average speed of 13.79 Mbps, while …
13Mbps... I am on ADSL2+ and I am glad to get 8Mbps (average about 7Mbps) connection speed. Friends and co-workers on ADSL get around the same. The only people I know who get better are the ones who have been fortunate enough to get an NBN fiber connection.
Even the connection at work doesn't reach 13Mbps.
I have associates in relatively new estates in Sydney who can't even get ADSL in their estate and are forced to use 3G mobile services as 4G hasn't reached them yet.
13Mbps! That would be neat. Who has that in Australia? Where I live, despite being only 200 metres from the exchange I am forced to suffer 1.5Mbps ADSL1 and there is no chance of Telstra upgrading the DSLAM to ADSL2 because they signed a deal with the fucking NBN Co to retire their perfectly functional copper network on some sort of $90 Billiion fairies-in-the-garden plan to hook us all up to fibre optic whether we want it or not.
Even if the ridiculously over-priced NBN finally arrives in my area (in 2048 natch) it will undoubtably be so prohibitively expensive that I may not even bother switching to it anyway.
Of course eventually they will dig up the copper and force me to buy their product (or do without).
Somebody has to pay for that $90B pricetag after all.
You gotta love socialist governments. Why people keep voting for those arseholes escapes me.
But if you ignore the little island nations there's an awful lot of developed economies ahead of you. I don't hold faith in any "it's a big country" logic either as 14m out of 22m Australians live in just 5 cities. In any average it will thus be their connection speeds which dictate the average through weight of numbers. Go down to 16th place on the population by area statistic and you have 80% of the population. These are statistical areas so may involve a large spread around the central habitation point. However cabling up 49 urban areas still hits ~74% of the population. Big it may be but it is also concentrated.
Where can I get these fabled speeds? I am lucky to get 8Mbit on a good day, and this is a massive improvement over my previous house down the road, where I was getting about 3.5. I don't know anybody who is getting higher speeds than this. I think 13Mbit as an average is wildly over-optimistic.
I live in a business / urban suburb that is close to the exchange (Subiaco WA) and I get 17 Mb. When I tell co-workers of these fabled speeds I get mixed reactions. Disbelief - wonder - excitement and hope.
Most report 2 - 8 Mb as the norm so 13Mb seems VERY high.
<- Icon, because....
ADSL 2+ went in a couple of months ago - fairly consistent 18.5 Mbps since then.
But we do have other problems - a 10 day outage when mice gnawed through the wires in the pillar at the end of the road and an 8 day outage when a neighbour ploughed through the cable run ...
What is surprising about this data. It seems eminently believable. Given that household connections dominate the data, and ADSL connections dominate the home connections, we could conclude that the average ADSL connection speed is somewhat (but not too much) less than 13 Mb/sec - taking out Fibre/Cable will reduce the average.
To get 13 Mb/sec you need to be on ADSL 2/2+ and live about 2-3 KM from the exchange or RIM. That is a reasonable description of a lot of Australia. So where's the problem with the figures?
What's disappointing in this article is the implication that somehow this is good enough because a few tiny countries have different geography. It's not good enough, because many (probably more than) half the population get less than 13 Mb and they get it via an unreliable and end-of-service medium.
The interesting implication is that, to more than double the average bandwidth, let alone the guaranteed bandwidth, which is the Coalitions' plan, will require the a huge number of RIMS/Mini Exchanges plus huge investment in copper replacement, just to get a few steps up the ladder - assuming know one overtakes us in the interim.
I live inner city Melbourne, I'm live just over 2 km from an exchange, I have ADSL2+ AND I can only get 4.6 a couple of friends who also live close are about the same speed.
I also have extremely unreliable internet and phone service. The problem is the copper running past my house. This is the copper that Tony Abort wants to use for the liberal broadband.
....as to where Australia ranks when it comes to upload speeds. I wager it'd be lower than 45th. Oh, and Goat Jam, go take your Liberal Party propaganda elsewhere. There are plenty of News Limited circlejerk sites that will blindly swallow up such nonsense. The 90 billion estimate is based on assumptions which were either plucked out of thin air or are actually refuted by available data on the NBN deployment.