Industry bigwigs got together yesterday and bemoaned the lack of demand for broadband in Australia while Telstra was leading the pack in defending the nation's rollout of ADSL.
"Broadband deployment in Australia is about user demand," Telstra's chief technology officer Hugh Bradlow said at the Internet Industry Association (IIA) Blown to Bits Conference.
"Users are not saying that they're desperately demanding faster transmission speeds," Bradlow added, pointing to the fact that dial-up deployment is currently a cost-effective competitor in Australia.
When users can get unlimited dial-up download for US$5 to US$8 a month, it's not surprising that demand for ADSL is low, agreed executive director of the IIA's US arm, Dave McClure.
"Demand is very elastic depending on price," McClure said. "At US$25 the entire world wants it [ADSL], for US$35 the world wants all they can get, over US$50 and demand drops off."
The Internet is the most quickly deployed new technology in the history of the world, according to McClure.
"We did the Net in two years, now we want broadband tomorrow on top of that - I think we're being a bit impatient," he said.
Internet industry commentator and CEO of www.consult, Ramin Marzbani, was quick to agree that there's a misconception in Australia that "100 percent of people want broadband".
"But let's get real about what's going on," Marzbani said. "Email is the number one, key application. There's still a long way to go before it [broadband] starts fitting into our life more deeply."
Furthermore, with the average cable modem download per month between two and four gigabytes and 36 gigabytes the record download in one day, "Telstra's got to be losing money on every one of those connections out there," Marzbani said.
"If the rates that Telstra charged halved, it's unlikely there'd be a competitive rollout of broadband to residential areas," Marzbani added.
OzEmail CEO Justin Milne agreed that in Australia "we don't have a [ADSL] market at the minute".
"Telstra finds it economically imperative to maintain that monopoly for as long as it can."
However, Bradlow defended the telecommunications giant's monopolisation of the ADSL market saying: "it's simply not true that we don't want competition".
"It'd be nice to think for Telstra shareholders that there wouldn't be any competition," Bradlow said. "But somewhere in the next five-year timeframe new technologies will emerge and there will be competition. I can't see it any other way."
Although Bradlow did admit there were technological difficulties to consider when deploying large-scale broadband infrastructure, installing ADSL "will get better in time," he said.
"It's the start of a journey, it's not an end in itself."
My god, are these people in the universe as me? Making excuses about "lack of demand" to justify glacial rollouts of broadband services is just a cop out.
This is getting the same as the ISDN debacle. Price it high enough and of course there is not going to be demand.
Going on what I see around me is that there is a huge demand but people at not necessarily prepared to pay the price required.