Category: Telecommunications

The Age – Mark Pesce

When I moved to Australia, later that year, I had to give up the cheap and nearly limitless bandwidth I’d grown addicted to, settling for lower speeds at higher prices. My dad, at his home outside San Diego, pays $US30 ($A36) a month for service that would cost me $300 here. Australians pay at least 10 times as much for bandwidth as Canadians — and what Telstra fobs off as broadband wouldn’t even be called broadband in Canada. It’s too slow.

Everyone in Australia’s internet industries hates Telstra, ranging from quiet passive-aggressive fury to spit-the-dummy, foaming-at-the-mouth passion, quietly blaming Telstra for the fact Australia is basically an internet backwater, importing far more data than it exports, a balance of trade that can be directly tied back to those service agreements made back in the 1990s.