The prices for the National Broadband Network from Telstra have been announced.
The entry level package will cost AU$73.00 per month with AU$49.95 of that covering the Internet and AU$22.95 for the home phone. This gives you 25 Megabits per second.
The premium package is AU$100 per month, this gives you 100 Megabits of bandwidth. The download cap with the 100 Megabits per second speed is 500 Gigabytes, you can already get that much with an ISP like TPG, but I am not sure how long the download cap will last when you are using such a fast connection to watch ABC Iview or a lot of Youtube videos. Australia is already ranked 18th in the world in terms of broadband speed, and they want to give us a 100 Megabits per second speed when Japan has had Gigabit speeds for ages now. Australia, being the backward country that it is will always be behind other countries in terms of technology. At least we are a leader in selling everything off to China.
The speeds that the NBN will be supplying to customers will require a much larger download cap than 500 Gigabytes, that might not last very long at all with such a fast Internet speed that will eat into the cap very fast with constant downloads running, whether you are using Bittorrent, downloading operating system updates or uploading large files you have created to the web. I predict that the download cap will count downloads as well as uploads and this will not help. With more and more people using cloud storage of files and uploading photos to Facebook as well as uploading video to Youtube, the need for a much larger download cap is painfully apparent. The NBN will just be an overpriced white elephant if the service can not be used to its full capacity to actually benefit the nation, the school of the air could be revolutionised with video streaming allowing the teacher to talk face to face with the students over the Internet in high definition. That is one possibility, and the ability to enhance medicine with high definition video streaming allowing diagnosis remotely. Some people are against the NBN with the argument that we could spend the money on other things. The government is sending exorbitant amounts of money overseas instead of fixing the hospitals and roads right here.
Then there are the shootings in Sydney with motorbike gang terrorists shooting up peoples houses and flouting the law with illegal automatic weapons and the police seem to be helpless to disarm the gangsters and stop the terrorists that are terrorising the city. We need to take care of that as well as improving our standing on the world stage by getting world class broadband so that business can compete fairly with overseas companies that have access to far faster broadband than anything we have in Australia, the aforementioned broadband in Japan was 1 Gigabit per second ages ago. the information about the Telstra NBN plans is here: http://www.telstra.com.au/bigpond-internet/national-broadband-network/our-plans/. In the UK, there is an Internet plan offering 100 Gigabits per second infinitely faster than the Telstra offering: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3329000/sky-broadband-in-uk-first-with-100-gigabit-optical-network/. This connection is using an optical fibre link that is in place in the United Kingdom. So why is the National Broadband Network in Australia so much slower than this Sky Broadband link? 100 Gigabits per second is insanely fast, you could download a 1080p high definition movie in no time.
That is how far Australia is lagging behind the rest of the world, we need a world class broadband connection but the government are only funding a 100 Megabits per second connection instead of a Gigabit connection that would be more relevant in this day and age. That is what the government are always doing, I have heard they spent AU$5000 per laptop on the laptops they gave school children, that is amazing, since you can pick up a good laptop for less than that these days. Here is the Dell Australia website, they have a nice cheap laptop for AU$449.00. That price would have been reasonable, someone saw the government coming and grifted them good that day. But a 100 Megabits per second connection is really not that fast, although it is faster than we are enjoying at the moment. When you are using a 10 Megabits per second connection speed in Australia, anything faster seems like a godsend. This country is slipping downwards towards oblivion like America, they are sated with their reality television and American Idol and can not see what is going on around them, they are becoming more obsessed with celebrities, glued to Entertainment Tonight and the TMZ website, not caring about the gradual erosion of their rights, they just want to vote for the best singer on Idol instead of caring about the future of their nation.
That is why America is dying, and we are following them. Julia Gillard is on the leash of Obama and she is constantly fawning over the president and she does everything he tells her to do. Why are we not an independent country, why do we have to follow America into a war that has cost US$4,000,000,000,0000 so far. We could have ended world poverty with that amount, but instead we are bombing Afghanistan and Iraq instead, the modern world is sick and needs medicine. We are truly insane if we think that we can keep this up forever.