Rudd-net

Have a listen to Tuesday's Triple J show "Hack". It has Sen. Conroy grilled in an interview and followed by Stilgherrian's view on it all.

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/podcast/tuesday.htm

I must say that Aussie interviewers are mean, really mean, compared to the pussies we have sucking up to politicians here in Europe. A great listen.

As for my personal feelings on this? I'm a web-developer and I want to live in Melbourne as opposed to Amsterdam, so having work done on the infrastructure is of great interest to me. However, I also know that Sen. Conroy needed a popularity boost after that epic kiddy porn filter failure, so they may just be trying to harvest good-will.

Hi WM

I listened to that on the way home from work last night. Hack's always a good listen.

At $43 billion it works out to approximately $5000 per household - which seem like a lot. However, it is good to see a Govt making a decision that will have implications for the future (past the next few election dates anyway)

Personally - AWESOME. If they can pull it off it will be great. Possible yes. But it is going to take 40 odd billion... and there is the catch. There is a lot of debate as to if this is even possible with the current state of affairs.

This is one of the best decisions that they could have made, I just reckon that it won't be in my life time as I can't even get ADSL2 here let alone 100MB's of awesomeness...

In other countries where the govenment has seen the internet as a service/utility that is required for the people, it has done very well. (i'm talking Europe here not China). I'm all for it.

They also have the fact that they are smaller going for them. The fact that Belgium is one of the smallest country in the world I am sure is congruent with the fact that they have some of the best Internet infrastructure. But to get us to that level - we need to spend the dollars and that is going to be a hard sell to "joe public" and an easy target for the opposition government... long way to go.

Thanks - I was thinking China for a few seconds ;)

Up to last year Belgium had the worst bandwidth caps in Europe, actually. 10GB per month was considered generous. I average about 60GB a month. No... I'm not much of a pirate either. I listen to podcasts, streaming radio, WoW and download the occasional Linux iso when I'm horsing around with my netbook. There's nothing there, I can easily economize on. How do you aussies cope?

How odd... my cap is 60 GB a month and I only use about 10... but then I listen to most of my podcasts at work, I don't listen to streaming radio anymore (I have podcasts), and I don't have WoW.

Maybe I should measure how much bandwidth I use while streaming Triple J and playing WoW. Keeping several dozen daily/weekly podcasts up to date is probably the real killer though.

If you run over your bandwidth cap doing such mundane things then, in my opinion, internet service providers are stifling the growth of Internet commerce. Sadly that's the only growth sector we have left.

I have a good friend who has just moved back to Australia from the US and has done nothing but complain about the cap and the price on his internet plan.  In the US there seems to be no cap and the price I believe is still relativity cheap.

I seem to remember some outcry a little while back when the maximum cap in the US was set to 250 GB/month.  I still wonder how someone at home could go through that much in a month, but I guess with more ipTV channels and more content being delivered via the net, in the future, I guess we may get to this.

How could someone use 250GB/Month? one word "Torrents"

Dare I mention it it but services such as Hulu or Pandora to mention but a few. 

Gaming can use 30MB per hour easy, add voice on top of that and you have a bandwidth munching machine.

Streaming audio like Last.FM can get you through a bit as well, but not as much as you would tjionk unless your a hardcore user that plays it every day for hours.

Now Second Life - there is a bandwidth muncher!

But yeah me; I use about 15-20 GIG per month. Use the above services a bit but not much and don't do any gaming really and I don't use torrents at all. So me I am pretty conservative as well. I do have 25GIG available but have never come close.

all i know is i don;t like paying $79.95 a month here in the west of oz for 8Mb/s with 25Gig cap especially when i only ever receive 4Mb/s at most. i know we are a big country but i really think we've dropped the ball on this one, thats speeds AND costing

Same here Mattoid (or Chris) I get between 4.0 and 5.0 on a very bloody good day so I feel your pain mate and I don't think I am going to see ADSL2 anytime soon. Oh and I am paying 68 bucks for the same thing you are paying less for :)

I pay about $50 (Canadian) for 512k up/7 Meg down with a 60 GB per month cap. On most days I get 512k up and 6.8-6.9 Meg down... and I'm on a cable modem.

I think the most I ever used in a month was 10 GB... no torrents for me!

I pay $52 (USD) for 1Mb up/ 20Mb down with a 250Gb cap from Comcast Cable (I recently found out about the cap in the local news).

You can downscale your SecondLife bandwidth by reducing your draw distance on objects.

Caps are starting to hit the USA now and they ain't happy!