State of the Internet Down Under? A quiet suburban town 18km away from Sydney with no CBD to speak of called Riverwood boasts Australia’s fastest average broadband speeds at 5.8Mbps, but according to Akamai’s latest ‘State of the Internet’ report this is a rare treat. With only 12 per cent of its internet users enjoying speeds higher than 5Mbps, Australia has …
Strewth, it's basic economics, innit.
All the examples of high speeds on the Pacific Rim were from City States or countries with high population densities. Why would a network spend a bajillion dollars improving the infrastructure to Yabba Creek (pop. 300), which is 500km from the next town?
The connection between your PC and your ISP's server may well be 20Mbs but was the throughput 20Mbs - I very much doubt it. By the time ISPs have finished traffic shaping, throttling this service and that service, what you often end up with is an actual data throughput figure which is way below the connection speed.
I have the fortune to live in inner Sydney about 1.5km from the exchange. I get an ADSL2+ speed of around 18mbs. Browsing is fine with a little page lag especially to sites like BBC , The Reg and some local Aus sites served Overseas.
I also have an ADSL connection at my mothers in middle England also about 1.5 km from the exchange the ADSL reports speeds of around 5 mbs.
However the UK site delivers far snappier browsing with perceivably less lag that the Aus "fast" link.
So in my experience the secret to fast browsing is really the ISP back bone not the ADSL to the customer.
It is worth remembering though that nearly 13.5m of the 21m population live in just 5 cities and that in these cities (and plenty of other urbanised areas) fast speeds are available via cable. I have the choice in one of those cities of a cable connection (17Mb/1Mb) for $70/mth or ADSL (~2Mb/0.5Mb due to distance from exchange) for considerably less per month. Maybe the connection speed for many (not ones in tiddly towns) is a function of uncompetitive pricing as much as geography, after all anyone in my area could be either 2Mb or 17Mb depending on what they want to fork out? That's a big difference.
The politicians are remarkably dumb-arsed though.
... the better the network connectivity. For countries such as Oz and NZ, where the population is very spread out, you're not going to be able to get the high-speed connections that (eg) Singapore or Hong Kong can manage without having to pay substantially more $ per user. So, the ISPs claw the cost back by using high contention ratios and traffic shaping, and market 20Mbps connections that in reality you can only just squeeze 1Mbps out of.
Once the National Broadband Network finally gets off the ground we'll be a bit faster.
Bundled with that, will be the Great Australian Firewall that will so heavily restrict everything, that the only traffic that will actually pass through it will be either news sites and their Policially Biased Claptrap, or IPTV sites that give more airtime to the latest [insert body part here] fat buster, than they do to quality programming material such as exiting game shows, more celebrity cooking shows, and a wide variety of brilliant american programming.
Yay.
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