h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What is wrong with broadband in Australia? It's too expensive, that's the problem. You can expect to pay more than AUS$50 a month for broadband, after the AUS$(--several hundred) installation fee. (AUS$1 = about US$0.54 and about Euro 0.56) After that, most services are capped at between 500Mb and 1Gb per month. Beyond that limit, access is charged at some ridiculous amount of money - large fractions of a dollar per megabyte.

This is not a problem when one only wants to access email and the occasional web page. But that's not what broadband is about, is it? Telstra and Optus, the two major carriers in Australia, have such a nice little duopoly arranged that there is no market incentive for them to drop their prices. It's not entirely their fault - American carriers are able to offer cheaper services to their domestic customers by levying higher fees for international access, pushing our local prices up - but in a country with a quick uptake of new technology (approaching an average of one mobile phone per person) and high standard of living, the low penetration of broadband Internet is a shame and a failure.

It's just not affordable. Luckily I am accessing the Guide from a university network, so I am only paying fifteen cents a megabyte for access beyond the university's servers, but when I move out of my college in a few weeks, it's going to be back to the ol' 56K. And you're lucky to get 33Kbps out of one of those, thanks to line congestion and a spiffy innovation by Telstra relating to ADSL. Basically, to make your house ADSL ready, they take the existing phone line and cut it in two, bringing some supposed benefits when you're using broadband, but making modem access unreliable. So you can't use your modem, and are forced to upgrade to ADSL to get reasonable access, but you can't afford that, because you're a poor Arts student on rent assistance. Brilliant. Thanks a bunch, Tel$tra.