They intend to lobby government and industry on improving broadband services and setting standards to meet user expectations.
The Australian Telecommunications Users' Group (ATUG) and the Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU) will come together with their individual expertise to lobby for a better deal for consumers.
The groups' number one priority is to lobby for service standard expectations for users and vastly improve the reliability of broadband facilities.
-There are so many voices in the market, getting shared agreements makes for a better understanding," ATUG's managing director Rosemary Sinclair said.
Sinclair says the group's initial focus will be for industry to meet specific user service standards on Internet connectivity, which meets the same level that voice services do.
-We're going to talk to the carriers and ISPs to ensure the industry lives up to user expectations," Sinclair said.
Sinclair says industry needs to meet broadband service reliability as the current standard of the service will make business too nervous to get on board.
-We need to lobby to get service reliability up to scratch, as business won't be able to move to broadband because it's not reliable or stable," Sinclair said.
Recent outages on Telstra's ADSL network--in which it's upstream connectivity service was down to customers for a total of 331 hours over a two-month period--has given broadband a band name amongst users.
In a previous ZDNet report, Sinclair said, given increased business participation on the Internet and the amount of services available to users, -it is simply not good enough that [services are] sometimes on and sometimes off and we still have to pay for it."
Along with the group's initial lobbying effort, Sinclair says there are is a whole raft of issues which will follow, including Telstra's unwillingness to provide static IP addresses, which she claims businesses can't host their own Web site without.
-We don't know why Telstra ADSL doesn't support static IP addresses?" Sinclair said.
