[ comms geek ]
[ rant ]

Australian broadband technology is a contradiction in terms. We are currently ranked behind Estonia and Malaysia in relation to broadband penetration into the mass market. We have Senator Alston, a.k.a. Senator Luddite to thank for that. He is our Communications and I.T. minister. He didn't have his own e-mail address for years and just spent AU$ 4 million his boring and ugly department website.

We are on crappy dialup! We cannot get ADSL as we are too far from the exchange and lose too much data to trans loss (attenuation, cross-talk, etc) because the morons who installed the main cable in our area decided to take it in a wild tour rather than just following the direct pattern of the roads.

The ONLY option is cable. We don't even get the choice of companies hence it is really expensive. And we'd have hideous download limits - pay $90 a month and what do you get? A lousy 3 gig cap, that's what! They try to soften it by saying that it equates to 600 mp3 files, but the scumbags also meter you for uploads and clearly have NO idea how much data transfer simple browsing can accrue!

What's even funnier is they count 1 GB as 1,000 MB not 1,024 MB. Likewise, they consider 1 MB to be 1,000 KB not 1,024 KB and so on down the chain to the byte units. The 3 gig is an illusion worthy of Copperfield. Which moron decided that one? Obviously the same guy who designed my laptop HDD a month after he bought his I.T. degree on eBay!

To make matters worse, we are on 56k dialup, but the line quality is so poor that we achieve 33k at best. The general quality of the Australian PSTN copper network is so shocking, that whenever it rains, we have twice the number of faults coming in at work (I work for a telco). Our line, in particular, is so noisy when it rains that we get disconnected constantly.

It's a joke.

[ /rant ]
[ /comms geek ]