Peter Beattie has a clue

Posted by Ian Holsman Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:56:00 GMT

The premier of Queensland (like a governor) recently announced a plan for Fibre to the home.

I personally like this approach, as it creates a level playing field for ISPs and lets the government control/maintain a central infrastructure (which they could onsell later on).

Compare this with the Telstra ultimatum of doing the same thing ONLY if they didn’t have to let other wholesalers on it.

or the other approach where a consortium of 3 major ISP’s would do the same thing (which I liked better).

What I think Queensland should do with the infrastructure once built is to tender out the day to day management of it to 3rd parties, and keep the long term maintenance to themselves

This would keep the price competitive (for the ISPs and the end customers) and keep the service worldclass, which is an issue when you have a monopoly.

previous posts on the same issue here

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internet speeds in australia - an ISP speaks out

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 30 May 2006 21:12:00 GMT

as a followup to the recent blog posts about the internet in australia, I thought i’d mention that iiNet has just released a white paper detailing the myth of fiber to the node that Telstra is saying we need in order to get these speeds.

They claim we can already get 8Mbs with ordinary ADSL connections, and that telstra’s wholesale arm has artificially limited the speed to 1.5Mbs (in order to convince the government and the public to pay them 3-5billion to upgrade the network, and more importantly LOCK EVERY ONE ELSE OUT).

I’m not sure if they are claiming this or not (I just skimmed through the report), but I think they are also saying that when iiNet introduced their DSLAMs into the exchange all of a sudden the Telstra DSLAMs performed faster as well (page 7 and 8). nothing illegal here.. but ethical?

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Internet speeds in australia

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 23 May 2006 17:49:00 GMT

In a example of [self-interest](http://www.theage.com.au/news/wireless—broadband/pbl-boss-calls-for-net-to-be-fixed/2006/05/22/1148150189885.html), James Packer, the head of a major media empire (PBL) in Australia is calling for the government to spend the taxpayers money (and other large media companies) to create bigger pipes so to allow his company to put it’s streaming content over it.

While I do agree that the broadband speeds here are slow, and the download caps are annoying, I’m not sure why it is the government’s responsibility to fix it.

Maybe PBL should seed the broadband rollout, similar to how google is partnering with earthlink to enable free-wifi in San Francisco.

By investing in some network infrastructure between the major cities it will cause the backbone data-rates to decrease, allowing ISPs to remove/raise the download caps and make it cheaper for people to go online (and then watch his media)

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