Broadband promises crash Aussie election

THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT has promised to deliver “high speed” (ahem) broadband to 99 per cent of Australians by June 2009.

With a federal election approaching, the Howard government announced a tit-for-tat response to the Labor opposition's notion of providing broadband to 98 per cent of the population, by going the extra per cent.

Both parties think high-tech infrastructure spending will be a key issue in the forthcoming election, which has to be held no later than December of this year.

Howard's plan calls for AU$2billion in expenditure, roughly half private and half public, and will lead to 99 per cent of the population of having access to speeds of at least 12mbps through a mixture of FTTN in built up areas and wireless in remote areas.

The opposition plan calls for AU$4.7 billion in spending and the opposition has criticised the government's plan. More significantly, the formerly-government owned telco, Telstra has also criticised the plan, saying it does not improve significantly on current services.

Australia has lagged behind other countries in the broadband speed stakes for years, and things are getting no better. Fighting continues between Telstra over Fibre to the Node (FTTN) the federal government, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and the so-called G9 of other major Telco operators over who will bear the cost of infrastructure roll out. The G9 and Telstra have also skirmished over ADSL2+ provisioning and line rentals.

Broadband speeds, even in the five major Australian cities are laughable, with great swathes of cities unable to access even ADSL2+. Businesses and individuals are reduced to either standard ADSL, which runs at a speed of up to 1.5mbps, or to cable broadband, which has a speed of up to around 10mbps down the pipe, but which is speed limited to 256kps up the pipe. Anyone who has ever tried to use a webcam, upload a file to an FTP server, or send a couple of email attachments will know how slow 256kps can be.

Politicians have sidestepped the issue for years. Rupert Murdoch slammed Australia's under-developed networks last year while Yahoo and Channel 7, one of the major commercial networks in Australia, reckon Aussies don't want to download TV from the net because it is too slow and pundits have decried slow services for years. It is only now that an election approaches that promises are bandied about willy-nilly.

Given the current climate, and low level of debate, one wonders if either plan will be implemented, post election, or whether it might just get caught up in politicking, as always seems to occur. Meanwhile, Australia continues to lag behind. µ