Aust broadband must get down to business

Providing content to Australian home users will be a difficult market to break into, and companies wishing to do so are looking at a long timeframe, Muscat told ZDNet Australia. However, Australian businesses, he said, are well placed for attacking the Asia-Pacific broadband market if they play to their strengths.

-The [Asian] business market is the one with the most immediate opportunity, because the timeframes aren't as long," Muscat said. -The benefits are quite tangible."

However, Muscat pointed to the low penetration of broadband in Australia as a major hindrance to Australian companies looking to obtain business with Asian trading partners.

-It's about being able to communicate with those markets and exchange information," said Muscat. -Like 10 years ago, if you didn't have a fax machine you were at a disadvantage, the Internet is no different and broadband is the key here because you're able to transfer information instantaneously."

-For example, if I was a building company tendering for a huge engineering proposal in Hong Kong, I'd be sending over a proposal that is many, many pages. They'd be shooting huge amounts of data back to me, and if I've got a 56K modem and they've got a two meg connection, I won't be able to cope."

Muscat believes to achieve critical mass in the broadband market the ratio of broadband to narrowband has to approach one-to-one, and that Australian governments at all levels need to take a leadership role in encouraging the uptake of broadband.

-Ultimately, if they are interested in developing markets which are rich in content for home markets or very strong in business markets...government needs to be more proactive," he said. -It's not a case of throwing buckets of money at it but showing strong leadership. The countries where broadband has developed the strongest markets are those with strong competition and deregulation."

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Crap on! Leave everything to ...Anonymous -- 30/07/02

Crap on! Leave everything to the government eh.... jeeeeez.

".....and that Australian governments at all levels need to take a leadership role in encouraging the uptake of broadband."

What rubbish! Maybe if telcos reduced the price of broadband together with making the bloody thing stable, then maybe people like me would consider switching over.

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The only way that broadband wi ...Anonymous -- 31/07/02

The only way that broadband will take off in Australia is with sensible pricing.
Flat rate is a must!!!
Even those plans that allow 10 Gig/month will leave most power users paying more after the first week of the month.
The capacity is there.
Make it flat rate and you will make more in the longer run as more users adopt broadband.
Every country that has made broadband affordable has seen commensurate increases in usage.

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Spot on... It must be a govern ...Anonymous -- 31/07/02

Spot on... It must be a government initiative, with their 51% ownership of Telstra they are the only ones who can influence this process. If our government had enough foresight to see the long term advantages of this technology then maybe we wouldn't be in this situation today.

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Not unless monopoly is dismant ...Anonymous -- 02/08/02

Not unless monopoly is dismantled, that is, Telstra owning virtually everything and the ISP under their nose, Australia will always be backward compared to other Asian countries who are developing their broadband.

Inefficiency, high price, and customer service arrogance always accompanies a monopoly!

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And, once again, anyone living ...Anonymous -- 04/08/02

And, once again, anyone living in the country is left out in the cold. We need to pay for 2 satellite dishes if we want both fast Internet and pay TV, because the Foxtel satellite's in a different part of the sky to the Telstra "broadband" satellite.

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Reality Check people. We have ...Anonymous -- 23/10/02

Reality Check people.
We have a country that's near the size of the US with 20 million people not 250 million.
So lets see, proportunatly we should be paying 25 times more for our services than they would in the US.
Ok it's not a fair comparison but accept the point. We are a dispersed nation with low population density.
It the government were to subsidise a Broadband rollout we would all benifit, but the minority would pay for me to surf the WEB,Hmmm sounds good for me.
Telstra make many billions in profit. 51% of that goes back to the Government, how about we see some of that 51% used to rollout a real broadband solution for us as we are Australia. Not John Howard, he's just one of us.

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When it comes to Broadband, yo ...Daniel Clarkson -- 15/03/03

When it comes to Broadband, you don't even have to go out into the country to find problems. Each person who has commented so far has a legitimate gripe, and I find that I must agree with them, unfortunately, the answer is not quite as simple as some of you seem to believe.

It's not that the government only needs to take action, everyone needs to get on the bandwagon. We, as consumers need to get our viewpoint across. With the Telstra hardware restricting ADSL access to 3.5Km from the exchange (maximum distance) you see the effects of using cheap technology. Why did Telstra do it this way? Simply, fear. They were afraid that the uptake of ADSL might not be sufficient to justify the cost of provision. So they used a cheaper technology, that has put them into a Catch-22 situation -- The cheap hardware restricts their ability to get sufficient customers to justify the higher cost of better quality hardware, that they need to get to make the effort worthwhile. So, they cannot justify the higher cost of better hardware, because they don't have enough customers connected to ADSL. If they had used the better hardware, they would now have sufficient connections to have justified the higher cost, but because they didn't, they don't.

Edens Landing (my home) is just 5Km from Beenleigh and the nearest phone exchange (Telstra). I'm too far away to get ADSL. All services are underground here (water, phone & electricity). There is no cable, bye, bye that option. It might be possible to get satellite, but what happens during the next storm. My neighbour has a satellite dish on her roof, and during a recent storm, it was struck by lightning. Her set top unit was a melted blob in the morning, and I don't want to see the same happen to my PC.

Even if I lived in an area where ADSL or cable was available, I definitely don't want to use Telstra, their customer relations are absolutely shocking, even if you are one of their customers. It's even worse if you are not.

What I'm hoping is that an option that presented itself about 12 months ago, with the utilities companies (e.g. Electricity supply) getting involved with high speed internet access (such as Energex here in Queensland) will get off the ground soon. Basically, the cable infrastructure already exists, and it's a simple matter to connect the required hardware to access the system.

So let us all get off our gluteus maximus (backside) and send a message to all that are involved in providing internet access, so that WE can get what WE want, rather than have the ISP's and government providing what THEY think WE want!!!

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