Broadband Internet in Australia
Old folks used to say “To survive, all you need is food and water“.
Well, not anymore – “To survive, all you need is the Internet!”
Australia has become a virtual nation.
In Australia, everything imaginable can be ordered or arranged over the Internet. This includes all the basic goods and services to insurances, government and state paperwork, bank accounts, investments, rental properties, travel and entertainment.
If you live in Brisbane, you can even find out where the cheapest fuel prices are with the Triple M Bowser watcher! No need to be late for a date – get the latest from the live traffic webcams here. With a streaming audio connection, you can plan your route around the radars…
Overall, internet performance is quite reasonable – obviously some will disagree – and those that do, have never been to Africa!!!
Basically, your internet performance depends on the following factors:
- Firstly, your link speed (dial-up or broadband) to the ISP – Internet Service Provider. Forget standard dial-up unless you’re planning on cutting your wrists
Accept nothing less than ADSL, preferably ADSL2+ Broadband. More than 15% of Australians have home broadband connections. - Secondly, your ISP’s connection to the Internet. Avoid those ISPs that oversell their bandwidth – get an ISP performance benchmark (like for the UK) before committing to a broadband contract and package option.
- The download server’s connection to the Internet.
The last factor is completely out of your control. The only advice here is that if there is an option to download via FTP (file transfer protocol) – take it!
FTP carries at lot less baggage – protocol overhead to manage the download – and so downloads generally take less time. The FTP protocol also supports recovery, which helps if your connection is unreliable.
Ideally, starting another download should have little effect on the download performance.
Depending on where you are in the world, even if you have the best available ISP, Internet performance could still be poor. This is caused by the country itself having a poor Internet Backbone connection – 400Mbps for South Africa – Ag shame
Twenty million Australians struggle to share a couple 10…40 gigabit links growing to lousy 2-terabit PIPE Pacific 1 (PPC-1) USA link in late 2009 ;-(
If you can’t deal with the pain and own a bank, use a satellite link! Now that’s a really expensive option but available if you can afford it.
Internet performance is also affected by the local time relative to the target server time. In Australia, mid mornings during the week are generally reasonable when connecting to servers on the west coast of the USA – California et al.
Overall, weekends – in particular Saturday mornings are the best as shown in the figure below. The destination server in this case is lives in Berlin, Germany, Europe and so they’re asleep, so I get to use all their bandwidth
To find out where the destination server lives, use tracert or a tool like VisualRoute to perform a network trace.
Many Australians are currently unhappy with their ADSL, ADSL2+ broadband speed. For some it is a question of raw performance whilst others have issues with wireless broadband coverage. Wireless internet coverage is an issue! As a slave to this coverage, just changing the angle of the high gain antenna swings signal strength from 90% to 40% – that sucks! This change in signal strength drops transfer rate down to an unacceptable 40KB/Sec.
I hear the 3G network that Telstra has been promoting, supposedly giving cellphones broadband connectivity and performance also has issues with coverage.
Now in Australia it could all be jealousy at 1.7Mbps – some of our Asia Pacific cousins like Japan have an average internet connection speed to the home of 45.6Mbps ;-(
Later this week I’ll add some costing for the Broadband Internet Packages in Australia.
