Mobile Internet is now available to you! Surf your fav sites like Facebook & Google on the go!

Then it contains a site that is only accessible from within the 3 network. My Skypephone without Internet access is actually pretty useless — except for making and receiving phone calls. It’s certainly a great news for me! Now I can upload photos and update status on Facebook, read my favourite news sites, blog and Twitter on my phone!

Then I saw the pricing.

Yes you read it right. $5/MB within 3′s Broadband zone and $8/MB roaming. I thought I paid Telstra Direct 20 cents/MB 10 years ago was expensive. 3 surely knows how to rip off their prepaid customers!

Well. It does spell a way out. You can either join 3′s new prepaid plans at minimum $29/month (used to be my 6 month mobile spending…) to get up to 150 MB of data ($1/MB from the $150 cap value). Or, I can sign up to X-series Essential $5/month to get 20MB of data. There’s no way I am jumping to their new caps because even $30/2 months for the old prepaid is excessive to me, as I can never make enough calls to use up all the credit. On the other hand, 20MB with the X-Series is a bit restricting. I’ve only used the mobile broadband for a day and I can easily swallow 20MB in one day.

… and it appears that prepaid customers cannot sign up other X-Series packages. I’ll be just fine if I can subscribe the 1GB/month $20 package — but Three knows that if it lets it happen, everyone will just jump on prepaid and load it up with data packs, instead of using the much more expensive mobile calls.

Exactly like what John L at Exetel has described — HSPA mobile broadband is the future, but service providers still want to hold onto the more ludicrous voice calls.

I guess I probably won’t hold onto my 3 phone for too long. Not being able to use mobile Internet cost-effectively is getting more and more annoying. I don’t make much phone calls — I just want Internet access anywhere I go, cheaply. Why should I sign up those capped plans when I am making less than 10 minutes of phone calls per month? Subsiding for other heavy users (think about it — it’s what cap plans are all about)?

Exetel’s HSPA broadband plans are actually quite attractive at the moment. $25 once off activation fee. $5/month service fee, and only 1.5 cent per MB, charged by your exact usage. Then fairly reasonable mobile call rates, but who cares when you can use VoIP over HSPA.

You do need a HSPA-enabled phone though. Too bad my Skypephone only does UMTS. Have to wait until it dies now…

Besides, the new modem I got is also ADSL2+ compatible. Looking at some of the providers it seem that an ADSL2+ connection provided by SSS (Spectrum Services Sharing) might even be cheaper than the 512k/512k I got at the moment. Hmmm… Need to check whether my local exchange is supported first.

DSLAM Watch

One website that provides such coverage is DSLAM Watch. According to them, Kensington exchange (if your phone number starts with 02 9662xxxx) has iiNet‘s Broadband2 installed, and TPG under construction, and People Telecom pending for August this year.

Wow. Choices. Aargh! Choices….

iiNet

iiNet’s Broadband2+ has a nice Ajax number checking tool. Neat :) Even nicer when it tells me that “Initial checks show broadband2+ is available in your area”. However, I am not really keen with their plans.

First of all, you are required to have your landline bundled — at line rental of $33.46 per month. That’s even more expensive than what I am paying to Telstra! As I have decided to migrate to VoIP, it is a bit pointless to pay for such high line rental for a service that you won’t use. Even its VoIP rate is not the cheapest I can find. Thank you, but no thanks.

Worse still, I need to pay $29.95 a month to get business pack in order to have an static IP address. 20 email addresses, 60Mb of webspace and reverse DNS are useless to me. Sounds like iiNet is not for me.

TPG

TPG has targeted to activate its ADSL2+ DSLAM in Kensington in April 2006, yet there is still no pricing on their DSLAM web page. It just seems so hard to find information on their website. Their current residential ADSL has no option to have static IP address, and their business ADSL is way out of my range.

Moreover, my parent’s place in Queensland uses TPG ADSL. With the experience I had dealing with them, they are not the kind of service provider that I want to be with…

People Telecom

My ADSL was actually with People Telecom for 8 months in 2004 (when they were known as SwiftTel). Left them because there were better deals, but I don’t mind coming back if their ADSL2+ plans are interesting.

Although they don’t have Ajax exchange checker like iiNet’s, but their exchange list is informative enough to tell me that Kensington exchange will be activated in August. Which August though? :) Pricing looks alright — ADSL2+ speed with 10Gb quota (more than enough for me) for $60 a month without phone bundling. Moreover, the fine line writes “All plans include a static IP address“!!

Sounds like it is my only viable solution for now. Still 5-6 months to go if the exchange is activated on time, so a lot of things can happen in between. Especially if…

Exetel

My current ADSL provider, Exetel has recently sent out an email stating their ADSL2+ live test will start in late April in some selected exchanges (mainly CBD, inner-city and North Sydney). 10Gb for $50. No bundling. Static IP. Uncounted off peak download. And their network has been rock solid for the last year and half I have been with them.

Sounds like a “go” to me, only if my local exchange is available.

Btw, I think Kensington exchange is on the Todman Avenue, between Kensington Road and Lenhall Street (very close to where Grimmo lives). That’s around 3km from my place, so I probably will not expect 24Mbps :(

Alright. Enough dreaming (especially over things that won’t be available in a few months).

One “promise” by the coalition party is the privatisation Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunication company that is currently having a monopoly on the copper network infrastructure. Yesterday, Tim Costello of Liberal said that it would be delayed until at least 2006, and today John Anderson of National is in the position not to rush the sale. While most broadband users in Australia would cry out “sale sale!”, and in general understanding a private enterprise is more efficient than a government one, I do see reasons why Telstra’s privatisation should be delayed.

I guess for someone living in metro area it does not really matter. A lot of things we simply take for granted – water, electricity, public transportation, and also our telecommunication needs. No so with those who live in the middle of no where – where the majority of Australia is. Once an enterprise has been privatised, its mission would become getting as much earning per share as possible, instead of serving each individual especially the unprivileged, like what a government organisation should have done.

As someone living in the Sydney Eastern suburbs, I can be ignorantly saying, “forget about the rural area – just serve me and I will give my money to you!” A fully privatised company would perform most of its activities near where the money is – phrase in ADSL2+, lay optical cables in highly populated suburbs, etc. But, by inviting Telstra to work on where the money is, are we selfishly denying the farmers living in the rural Australia from getting their telecommunication infrastructure fixed?

Proverbs 31:8-9
⁸ Open your mouth for the mute,
    for the rights of all who are destitute.
⁹ Open your mouth, judge righteously,
    defend the rights of the poor and needy.

Prioritisation should indeed wait until the telecommunication facility in the rural area has been updated. However, I do not think Telstra Wholesale, the enterprise that is responsible for most of our nation’s infrastructural need, should ever be solely profit driven. We should, however, split up Bigpond (the retail arm of Telstra) from Telstra Wholesale and fully privatise that instead, in order to eliminate any potential anticompetitive activities. Let Telstra continue to build Australia up, but let retail ISP’s compete equally.

Many people in this age depends on the Internet and take it for granted, just as we take water, electricity and telephone for granted. However, you only realise that how much you depend on it when it is not available to you.

Got an SMS from Swiftbroadband this morning saying that Telstra outage continues without a estimated fix date. If you see this website dropped off the net sometime today – you know what has happened.

But Australia is not Japan. There are reasons behind the high price of broadband Internet in Australia. Here are my analysis of this issue.

First of all, there are geographical reasons that makes Australia different from the other countries.

• According to Wikipedia, Australia has land size of 7,686,850 km². Large land area certainly makes telecommunication infrastructure building expensive. Especially when you started to lay copper/fibre for subscriber lines, every square metre costs. That brings Australians in big disadvantage in comparison with those in Japan, South Korea or Hong Kong.
• It is around 11,935 km (7,416 miles) from Sydney to San Francisco, the data hub for Australia and United States. There’s Pacific Ocean in between, and laying cable in the sea would probably be much more expensive than laying on the dry land. Guess how much money Australian Internet users would have to pay to utilise the Southern Cross Cable (SXC)? In comparison, Canada pays minimal to exchange data with the states.

But why is the United States so important? Because they have the content we want. Here’s some demographical reasons behind it.

• The majority of Australians speak and read English. So whenever an Aussie logged onto the web, he/she will most likely download content from a server that provides English content. That means majority of people will exchange packets with an overseas server (most likely in US) over one of few expensive pipes across the Pacific Ocean. That would again drive up the price when these pipes need to be constantly upgraded to cope with ever-increasing traffic. That is why countries in the Eastern Asia are not that worried about their links with the states, because people’s Internet usage are generally localised, be that Chinese, Japanese or Korean. I have actually used my parents’ ADSL connection to access US contents when I was in Taiwan last year, and the speed was quite disappointing. But not many people over there care.
• Australia also has a relatively small population (just a bit over 20 million) for its land size. At the end, telecommunication companies pay a high premium to set up the infrastructure on this big piece of land, but they cannot reap the same amount of reward due to a small population which produces small demand.
• Some people argued that Australia is relatively urbanised – majority of people are living in the major metro cities – therefore the infrastructural cost might not be that huge due to concentrated population. However, it does not mean that there is no one living in the rural side of the state. What would these people say if Telstra decided not to enable their phone exchange with DSL support? Those regional infrastructural building will continue to cost more than reap, but on the other hand they are still necessary.

Talking about the economical reasons, supply and demand – which one usually comes first? Should there be good supply if there isn’t enough demand?

• Broadband in Australia are still considered as an item of luxury than commodity. Most people I know (which are mostly university students) don’t have broadband Internet at home. They simply find no need for it. A dial up is enough for them to do emailing, Internet banking and weather checking. Most people certainly won’t download more than a gigabyte of data in a month, and there is just no demand for a fatter pipe for them. Price stays high when the demand stays low…
• But is broadband that expensive? Considering AUD$39/month 256kbps/64kbps 1GB plan is not that much more expensive than a $20/month “unlimited” dial up account when you factor in call costs (at 17-25 cents per call), blocking the line while dialling in, better speed, etc. After all, $39 pm is what people paid for those “unlimited” dial ups 4-5 years ago anyway. However, the set up cost is another matter. It is something costs virtually nil on dial up plans that would set you back hundreds of dollars on ADSL. You need to pay at least $150 initial cost to get your line connected + a budget DSL modem. That is just one reason why some people I know get scared off ADSL broadband.

There got to be some other reasons – what about the market monopoly? What about the government?

• Yes. Telstra still owns most of the phone exchanges across Australia, and it is the Telstra Wholesale that sets the pricing for down stream ISPs. They are in the monopoly situation – but funny that the “competition” cannot give us more competitive pricing to break down the monopoly. Optus Cable? DSLAM roll out by Internode and iiNet? Other DSL providers like XYZed? Maybe the infrastructural cost is really that high.
• Wouldn’t government stands up and grants telecommunication companies some “fund” to improve the infrastructure? Would you do it if you are John Howard? Would you vote for the party that slams tax payers’ money to telecoms infrastructure? Who would it benefit, from an average tax payer’s point of view, other than enabling his 13 year old son to download the warez at 10x the speed? There are other areas that need funding – health system and education just to name two. Considering our Johnny boy might attempt to lower the income tax rate for the up-coming election. Spending money on telecoms infrastructure? Maybe not.

But at the end, is broadband in Australia really that expensive? Well, yes it is relatively expensive. Affordable? Affirmative – it is still affordable by the general public I think. We do need the public to be aware of the benefit and actually subscribe to it, so hopefully the price will come down gradually when the demand picks up.

Moreover, many broadband ISP in Australia offers extra features to compensate lack of bandwidth, like virus/spam filtering, static IP address, and users are free to host servers/P2P services on their boxes, which I think might be rare on the other side of Pacific.

At the end of day, I would like my broadband access to be cheaper, faster and more reliable. But I do already enjoy what I have got at the moment, and hopefully the future is going to be better.

Update 11 Jan 2004: Slashdot ran a interesting story on broadband pricing across the world, and people in different countries reported how much they have paid for their DSL/Cable access. I reckoned Australia is okay regarding to the cost of access, but expensive comparatively in traffic cost, as most overseas ISPs provide a flatrate pricing.

Early this week, Telstra BigPond increased the value of their broadband service by increasing the traffic quota (download+upload) from 3Gb to 10Gb, and that includes their ADSL and cable offerings. While their residential ADSL products are still over-priced, it makes their cable product quite a good value, considering a fully loaded cable in a quite neighbourhood can be 3-4 times faster than the fastest residential ADSL download stream.

Apparently Telstra Wholesale, the Telstra that provides the exchange where every other ADSL providers have to connect to, also lowered their price. Suddenly we see a lot of price drops across different providers. That makes my hunt for ADSL provider for my new house a little bit complicated.

First of all, Internode, my current provider, doubled the download quota for their business plan customers. That makes my current connection a nice 4Gb per month on bridged mode static IP address, at expensive AUD$100 per month. Too bad that I usually only use 1Gb of download every month, and that increased download quota would not be much useful to me when I’ll probably be busy fixing up my new house for the next few months. With cashflow in mind, I’ve determined to leave Internode and change to a cheaper ADSL provider. I think I’ll miss my bridged connection (and struggle with PPPoE).

Due to my low download and static IP requirement, I sorted of narrowed my choices to 3 different providers. DART, Swiftel, and WestNet, whom all have their plans reviewed last week or so. Here’s my feature matrix with the plan I am interested in.

All 3 plans save me at least $35 from my current Internode plan each month (towards my mortgage, of course). Swiftel has nice cheap price, and I heard the network is quite good as well, but it lacks free contents from PIPE, which I might use a lot to download all that Linux ISO’s.

I still have around a week to decide. When it is connected, I then have to shutdown this site (been running for 354 days straight now), carry the box to the new place, and then start serving again.

It gives more download allowance for both Business and Personal ADSL users, and it also decreases the excess rate to be 13.9c/mb. At the same time, it also introduced the new FlatRate plan, which provides fixed monthly cost for the ADSL users, at the expense of quality of service. It is some form of shaping, i.e. reduce the quality of service or effective bandwidth of your link, if you have exceeded the download limit. It is suitable for those who download a lot, aka leechers in the broadband community, who are willing to trade network performance with download quota. However I don’t think many people currently subscribed to Internode will fall into this category, as most subscribers I believe are staying because of Internode’s performance, instead of their price/download ratio.

How then does this change affect myself? I am on the 512k bronze business plan, and the new plan has doubled the monthly download to 2000Mb at the same price! Well, now I am excited, or maybe I am not. Over the past few months, I struggle to use 500Mb each month, and now I will have even more struggle to use the download allocated to me. Well, maybe I will use the new quota to provide more services here, like the new FOCUS member weblog site. Anyway, I am happy with Internode’s service, as always.

The responses from the community, however, is not all pleased. Some people don’t think it is revolutionary, as they have waited 3 months for this new plan. Some people prefer lower price on the high speed plans, instead of more downloads. You can’t please anyone, can you? We shall see more heated discussions over next few weeks, as more people started rolling into the new plan.