Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Brisbane to leapfrog the Australia NBN

This is very ironic; while all of Australia is debating the six proposals to build a National Broadband Network (based on FTTN), the city of Brisbane (1.9m pops, 918 km^2) has ordered a study into the feasibility of constructing its own FTTH network. The city targets 0.1-1.0 Gb/s to every home and business, that is: True Broadband.

This is supposed to generate 15k jobs and add AUD 5bn to the local economy. Doing a little back-of-the-envelop calculus, the latter figure looks like around 6% of Brisbane's GDP. Not bad!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One thing I don't get is why do Australians pay so much money for internet? In South Korea, average monthly income is around $ 2000 AUD, we pay about 5 to $ 10 AUD/month for unlimited use(flat price is 5 - $10 AUD) of 100Mbps FTTH(download 1 dvd in 10 minutes or less and uploads one at similar time) including ISP provided internet cable TV. I think thats about the right price for internet isn't it? If you are paying like 100 AUD a month, you are being ripped off by your ISP. I don't think it cost that much money to maintain an internet service provider.

Anonymous said...

Until recently, gross physical capacity in terms of being connected to the United States.

2/3 of Australian internet traffic goes to the USA.

So, they have brought higher prices on themselves since they love American content. Aussies always have the option of not surfing US based content and just sticking with local content. Or, they can pay up in the form of higher broadband prices or invest in more underseas cable to the USA.

It is their own self-inflicted problem but yes their prices and service levels are lousy.