In what he's calling "the single biggest infrastructure decision" in the country's history," Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's announced an A$43 billion (US $30.6 billion) project to create a nationwide high speed broadband network. The goal's to get 90 percent of homes and business up to 100Mbps speeds with fiber optic connection, with a less impressive 12Mbps wireless / satellite for the rest. Up to 49 percent of the funds will be from the private sector; the government will initially invest A$4.7b, while A$20b will come from a national infrastructure fund and the sale of bonds. The venture's expected to take seven to eight years, and Rudd said the government intends to sell off its stake after five years. Sure, it's not
1Gbps by 2012, but hey, they might end up
beating us at the "nationwide broadband" game.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read - Sydney Morning Herald
Read - Reuters
posted Apr 7th 2009 3:04AM
...you da man k-rudd...
oh just found out in the paper yesterday (did all the reports go back a page on engadget?) that Tasmania will be the first place to reap the benefits.. ye TASMANIA!!! wtf. do they even use the internet?
Bit pointless when a lot of their internet is filtered, its like having a Ferrari and only a mile of road to run it on.
Or having the actual Bridge of the Enterprise only to have the magnetic constrictors on your warp core fail - limiting you to sub-light impulse engine speed...
To RoboDan:
How about...Nnnnnoooooo?
I love treknobabble, shame its not right.
Nothing is limiting the speed of the broadband only the use of it.
Its like having a starship without variable geometry nacells, you can still go full warp but you are limited as to where you can go so you dont damage subspace.
our internet is not filtered atm- and it never will be... there were talks of it happening but is was a big flop
What're you talking about? that never made it through parliament! It is a grim story from the past now!
Aussie aussie aussie!!
Isn't Australian internet usually capped?
Actually he's right, the warp engines would fail and reduce there speed due to the buggers putting a limit on how much the magnetic constricters can take before melt down. so enjoy the warp speed why you can. and then have to replace them each day / week / month depending on how close the space dock is.
It's not quite dead yet, Conroy will keep trying to push it at every opportunity. For instance he might have lost the battle to censor the current infrastructure but maybe he could get something specific for a government built one. Otherwise he can keep trying to get the current censorship thing passed continuously until it does. He can wait until some major child porn bust, ensure that the media are all over it, give it a face such as some kidnapped child's parents crying, hype it up and then try again claiming anyone against him hates children.
This thing is already so over hyped, they are making quotes with things like 'protecting children from childporn', like kids these days accidental browsing to child porn websites.
Also be careful of any claims about reduced scope of the censorship plan, even if he was to cave and make it opt in and massively reduce the list, once its in place its there for good and then it can just be increased more and more, optin turns into optout, add an extra mandatory list, the mandatory one turns into the full list. This basically already happened when it was in the discussion phase. If Conroy had just claimed he was going to block 10 websites only containing child porn, people might have let it slide, then slide some more when 10 became 20, 100, 200, 500, 700, 1000 and so on and then they add rape to the list, then bestiality, violence other extremes or simulated ones and then regular porn, then any kind of views they don't like such as hate crimes, religious in tolerance and so on.
Of course the entire thing is either to push the religious 'family first' party values onto everyone, or alternatively a way to stop filesharing by blocking BitTorrent sites so people are forced to buy media from Telstra at stupidly high prices.
Just so you can visit those sites that are baned at 100Mbps.
stop being such a mud baby.
honestly, i am sick of people thinking their smart and saying stupid shit. There was a filtering test and like 3 isp's out of like 1000 nationwide tried it out and they got pwned for it on: www.whirlpool.net.au/ that site there is the reason we will never have a filtered internet. The voice of the people is too strong on there there is like 300,000 members and our country only has like 12 million computer users (some reports lower) at the very most.
WTF IS OBAMA NOW BITCHES...
K. Rudd & Labor government motherfuckers.
Nice grammar, Crocodile Dundee.
Too bad that high speed internet will still be capped and have the Great Australian Firewall :-\
Nice to see progress though
Too bad the internet is so damn heavily censored down under, there's pretty much no use for that kind of speed. Thank goodness for free torrented porn though. Unless those trackers are banned. Damn. And I thought the great firewall of China was bad.
What the hell are you talking about? Do you even live in Australia? There is no significant censoring of the internet here as far as I know (read: I have never found a website to be blocked), and I browse a fairly colourful range of websites. Pornography is not censored.
/De-hype
Case in point: A Government anti-terrorism posted was once displayed all over Australia at bus stops and other public places. It featured an image of a supposed "terrorist" website, www.totse.com. This website is not filtered in Australia. In fact I was a forum member there since 2006 up until the site closed down this year. Never was there any filtering, spooks at my doorstep, or any of that kind of crap.
Hope that helps,
the_land_down_under
I dunno, but this seems to be a healthy amount of blocked sites. Who knows when they'll go China on you guys? I heard there's an ever-rising conservative movement down under.
Oops, silly me. forgot to link.
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Australian_government_secret_ACMA_internet_censorship_blacklist%2C_6_Aug_2008
What the hell are you going on about? There is no filtering system currently in place. And anyway, the governments _PROPOSAL_ that is getting flack from the entire country (media, opposition, professionals) is for the censorship of the most extreme things online, and it hasn't even been accepted yet.
"damn heavily censored down under" is a gross exaggeratoin.
2395 websites is statistically insignificant, and I believe they're largely underage / child abuse related, which I can accept and sure as heck doesn't negate the advantage of having a 12MB/sec connection. Additionally, the proposed filtering system is an opt in/out system.
Long story short, don't hype shit up.
@mark WRONG, it is a MANDATORY system which is meant to slow down the internet by up to 87%. Checkout the GetUp! website.
Anyway, it is never going to get passed through the senate.
unless you watch porn everyday I don't think the blacklist is a problem mate.
NO SITES ARE BLOCKED, for gods sake it was a 'proposal' that is pretty much a dead duck now, move on!!
They always start with the child porn, and everyone pretty much has to agree on that, but before you know it the censorship moves on to regular porn then "terrorists" and soon thereafter political discussions that are unwanted. Good thing Oz is a strong enough democracy to not let that happen.
Freedom of speech is a prerequisite for democracy yet it's also something you constantly have to fight for. For there are always forces who want to abolish it.
The plan to introduce internet filtering in Oz will never go ahead. I'd be willing to bet money on that.
As for 100mbps for 90% of the population, I think that's damn good for the country who's populations is more dispersed than any other in the world.
Once the fiber is laid you can always upgrade the equipment later on once the technology becomes affordable. That's the great thing about fiber. I just hope to god the lay more than enough to future proof it.
this is what america needs and should be part of the public works project to get everyone up to 1Gbps...
So the spam bots can hose those PCs with conflicker worm?.
This is what britain needs instead of the poxy 2mb they are aiming for.
yeah if everyone was running linux with a secure distribution it'll be a hard call...
Its a FTTH (Fiber to the Home) network and you photoshop in a Ethernet cable. Good effort.
But great news about the network!
What kind of cable would you use then? Fiber->Modem->Ethernet->Everything else Is generally the way it works.
The whole thing is there will no longer be copper cables running under the harbor, it will all be optical now.
Much better than the UK's crappy 2Mb for all guarantee...
THIS COMMENT HAS BEEN CENSORED BY THE AUSTRALIAN INTERNET FILTER
There isn't one, I live in Australia. I think the American's are jealous, still proud of their CDMA mobile network. We turned that off two years ago.
@adam
Yeah. CDMA sucks. Big time!
It's a minimum of 100Mbps with future capacity for 1Gbps.
It's a lot easier to get anything to 90% of the population when that 90% is confined to a 20 mile-wide strip along the coast.
Your looking at it wrong...
It's a lot harder to get it to 100% of the population with such a large country with nothing but desert in the middle.
I assume the people who don't live on/near the eastern coast will be the ones getting the 12mbps satellite.
...and this is different from the US how?
The majority of the US population live on the coast as well. Not to mention that Australia is the largest island on the earth, do you know how much coastline that is? A 12mbit guarantee is not a bad deal if youre living a couple hundred clicks out of Marble Bar.
Why do we have this contest between Aussies and Yanks? Geez people, Australians are human beings too. I'm an American who has never been to Australia, but I still respect them and have never had anything other than a polite and respectful conversation with dozens of Australians visiting (or lining in) the U.S.
Just to clear up things: the Australian internet censorship thing is not a compulsory thing. There is a censorship program that can be acquired if someone wants it. There were talks of making it compulsory but they're unlikely to get through. All the major Internet Providers here have rejected them.
Good on ya Kev - gosh he is keeping his election promises isn't he. I think it's grossly unnecessary though - what's wrong with the 25mbps ADSL2+ we've been able to get in major cities for the last few years already. Still, it's about the majority, not the minority and Kev's got to keep up appearances with our Asian cousins, who have much faster and cheaper internet than we currently do. Oh and surely this will be putting a final nail in Telstra's coffin seeing as the whole country won't have an excuse not to transfer to VoIP once this is all underway. I reckon he'll keep up the internet focus by introducing that 3 strikes and ur out rule for downloading offenders. Bugger.
100Mbs for the majority is great in the long run. But for now a much better investment would be in some significant capacity between Australia and the rest of the world. Unless its torrents/usenet I struggle to saturate my 10Mbs connection. For roughly 12 hours of the day even Youtube is painfully slow.
I'm here right now on exchange from America, I live in a northern Wisconsin where super fast internet is non-existent and to be honest the internet in Australia sucks 10x worse. As far as I can tell there isn't much of a censoring of the internet here though, occasionally Google stops working?
Internet isn't censored. At all. Not yet, at least.
So that means I can now watch porn on the top of Ayers Rock (Uluru). Sweet!!!
You could if you wanted on your 24Mbps Next G wireless, they do have coverage there!
@Chinthaka
Oi Oi Oi
I just wish, we could actually connect to the Southern Cross Pipe - talk about speed!
And I am fighting with my ISP (iinet) to actually give me the ADSL2+ that I have been paying for since 2005 and have never had!
Oh K-Rudd please do what you say you will do! Promises not kept are lies...
Cheers, Mates...
Oh yeah, about the censorship thingo...
DOitW - why?
The list was (and still is) on WikiLeaks ;-) and it caused a surge in traffic to the anticipated p0rn sites - so they (as in K-Rudd and gang) had to drop the programme.
One of the truly binding principles in Australia is the freedom of speech... and the right to perv... so there was no way this was going to pass....
Hold on some one is pounding on my door...
I'll be right back...
Good!
Australian hosts causes me to fail miserably in Call of Duty.
uh ... yeah - me, too! THAT'S why I fail at those games, yes...
although this is a step in the right direction, australian broadband costs and business models are ridiculous at the moment!
they limit your total DL's, have set aside peak times for DL'ing and STILL charge outrageous prices!!!
the speeds are pretty good, most can get 24meg connections but their business practices are nothing short of the convicts that they are.
besides, an eight year promise from a government that only lasts a few years....don't get your hopes up mateys!
oh yeah, and off peak is like from 1AM to 7AM (TPG) how ridiculous~~ that's for that 50GB ad they're throwing on billboards -- and 25GB is limited to "off peak" yeah like i'm gonna stream internet tv in the middle of the night everyday.
haha lol TPG dude are a bunch of assholes but you just cant beat their prices im on the $20 cap ($300 calls) its ridiculous. My friend got the ADSL2+ with it and got the mobile plan for $9.95 for $300 calls.
right now im with Adam Internet on a 20gb plan, they will probably be starting in Melb/Syd first up then they should hopefully move onto Adelaide so should be within a few years ill get a 100mbps plan with i reckon 60gb DL.
Presumably a good fiber system would eliminate (or at least *VASTLY REDUCE*) the need for bandwith caps. If everyone has fiber to their house, your bottleneck is WAY WAY WAY larger than it is with cable or fiber-to-the-node or etc.
Welcome to the world's biggest intranet...!
And in the country that invented the 'net, 25% of the country can't even get broadband. Meanwhile we're borrowing from our great-grandchildren to provide more bad loans for illegal aliens and criminals. God help the USA.
100Mbps, with what, 1GB cap? =D
speed is one thing. These ISP cap our lines -- so it won't be as cheap as you guys might have imagined...
Well congratulations Australia, in times when the worlds finances are going down the toilet faster then the runs, the land of Oz is gonna sped 43 billion dollers.
Yes I am jealous, in the UK we have, good ol copper wire, and that's if it isn't aluminium cause then your really f*****. BT have announced a plan to wire up...........18 exchanges with Fibre Optic to the CAB in the next few years!!!!! And the rest can have adsl2plus oooh wow still running on copper wires that can be 20 or 30 years old, but then again the dictatorship running, sorry, ruining the UK is just demanding what it wants done with the UK's BB, yet it won't put a penny towards it. Take my advice, the UK will be one of the single country's whose BB infrastructure lags WWWAAAAAYYYYYY behind the rest of the world. Because no one can be arsed to build it or pay for it!
ffs. The internet is not censored in Aus, and it is very unlikely that it ever will be. One nutcase minister is not going to get his way.
Man I cannot wait!! Finally Australia is advancing in something. Too bad it will take 7-8 years.
Go Australia :)
Of course Oz has some censorship on the web, so does the UK and probably the USA as well.
For fucks sake, not it isn't!
There's no censorship here in Australia, and anyone who thinks so should *REDACTED BY AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT*
Sweet!!!!
Can't wait. hopefully it will cost less than our $70/month for speeds of 1.5Mbps with a 4GB/8GB download.
And to all those that have said our internet is filtered, http://www.smh.com.au/news/home/technology/conroy-backtracks-on-internet-censorship-policy/2009/04/01/1238261622790.html.
well played australia:) wish gordon brown would do this for the UK! we could have upgraded the uk network if we didnt invade iraq im sure.
Lucky AussieBums lol
Now finally give them better connections to the rest of the world so loading Australian content won´t take so freaking long anymore and I´m happy. :D
dont worry, the Liberals will get in next and sell this off to Telstra, then we're all screwed ;)
I'm glad the government has taken this decision. If Telstra won't provide these services then good on the government for getting in there and funding this. I hope the entity that emerges will lead to more competition and lower prices.
It's a pitty its taken this long already and another 8 - 10 more years to emerge. I also hope it doesn't turn out costing twice as much as projected.
Gotta start somewhere right?
Nice Australia.
Now the U.S. needs to step up and give us our 1Gbps connections already!!! Damn greedy corporations...
Oh sure. They'll sell you 100mbps.
But just like Time Warner in the states, you'll be capped at 40gb/mo.
We already are...
It would just be faster.
Actually 40Gb would be a step up for many plans.
Good for websites in Australia - it'll still choke with websites outside of Australia.
K Rudd promised in his election campaign to create this network with telstra and when he got in and went to them to start they told him get fucked. Now he has taken it private. The government is only putting in $7 billion and other companies are putting in like $18 billion but the governments share is 51%, wtf? He also is trying to stop telstra and optus and others from sharing this market, so they cant make anything from it.
GOOD, fucking liberals really screwed us over by selling out and giving away Telstra in the 90's for like 15 billion yet we saw no upgrades in the industry till now??. Liberal scum gave birth to the worst company in Australia (Telstra) we don't want them part of our broadband revolution they are unreliable greedy and trick people who do not know much about internet plans.
That's it, I am moving to Oz. K Rudd rulerz.
i wouldn't mind having a 100mbps connection! i would be browsing like The Flash! xD
so... 100Mbps.. and everyone in the Oz is capped at, what was it, 5gig?
That means a couple of hours streaming video and that's it for this month. No more internet for you.
Must suck living there.. great bandwidth and not being able to use it.
I'm on a 200GB/month plan.
It's really only Telstra that has the most ridiculous plans. They have an ADSL2+ (up to 20Mb/s) plan, with a monthly usage limit of 600MB!! LMAO!! What a bunch of idiots. You can download it in
Yeah cool but no one tells you its all with limits. Here is all this speed but you only get 60 GB a month oh you watched a few movies. NOW PAY US 6 times what we said we would charge
The US paid the telecoms $200 billion to get 45Mb/s to 85% of homes back in the 90s, and they delivered exactly nothing. Hopefully Australia will actually require the companies it's paying to produce results.
First the straight 6 turbo charged Falcon now this...?!
Austrailia here I come!
Seems pretty sweet to me. Fiber-to-the-home is GREAT if you can get it. 90% of people having it? That'd be great, *regardless* of any censorship concerns, which will be there whether you've got a fiber connection or a dial-up connection.
Great technological infrastructure; I wish we had something like that here in the US, really. Well, I'm happy enough with private companies (ie verizon, etc) doing it, but since we're already spending TRILLIONS of (borrowed) public money on random things, at least a fiber-to-the-home system would be something that would actually benefit me.
but but but but how could they do it? australia is soooooo big compared to japan ???? /s
Notice Rudd has simply put off having to deliver anything for another 8 years.
fuck up ignorant. Tasmania roll out starts THIS FUCKING YEAR!!!. thats faster than Howard/Liberal could sell Telstra.. EAT IT!!!!!
12.5 MB jesus Christ
Well heck, I'm moving to Australia now.