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Massive panic attack today, my peak usage hit 30gb for the month to June 28. Anyone reading this inside the United States will have no idea what I’m talking about but it works this way: you buy broadband on a plan in Australia, even though they claim it’s unlimited (well some companies do,they lie…by unlimited the don’t charge you extra to use), you get X number of GB per month to download. Depending on the ISP and plan your uploads might also count to your quota (mine counts them 🙁 ). When you go over your quota you are “shaped” meaning that I was facing 3 days on an ADSL 2+ connection with a 64k limited speed. This is my phone pipe as well because we only have VOIP, so my phone calls would be screwed until the 28th.

Cheaper plans at around the $30/ mth mark might come with as low on 200mb a month. Until 5 minutes ago I was paying $89.95/ month for 30GB peak (defined as midday-2am) and 60GB offpeak (the rest of the time). I’m now paying an insane $119.95 for 65GB peak/ 65GB off peak. Usage last month was 30GB peak, 20GB off, but probably my bad because I haven’t been scheduling downloads to watch the usage…well actually I have, we did 5GB peak in 3 days, and it turns out it was my wife AND son. The wife was downloading work related clips, doing online conversions of large files, and the boy has been spending hours on YouTube. Still, this is what the internet if for, we are not the ones in the wrong here, it’s the ISP’s who impose these restrictions in the first place.

What next? If I look at my online consumption is has grown month after month and continues to grow. HD video online: bonzer, streaming video, you beauty, Podcasts via Apple TV…I never have enough time to watch them all. Australia risks slipping even further behind the rest of the civilized world, and most of the third world as well if it doesn’t start recognizing that true unlimited broadband is a key feature in keeping us competitive.

Congrats to Loren on this deal. He’s one of the smartest, most engaging and interesting guys I’ve ever spent time with, and a pure gentleman as well. I just hope it doesn’t result in too many more fluff pieces like these 🙂

Aside from the amazing variety of distribution paths, they promise priority uploads and encoding. They promised right.

WTF on every level….

SMH: Labor to deliver Lightnight internet speeds

Most homes will have broadband communication speeds up to 100 times faster than what is currently available, under the Rudd Government’s plan to wire Australia for the 21st century….

…by deploying VDSL, (also known as Very High Speed DSL) technology, Senator Conroy said the new network would be able to carry up to 25 megabits per second.

Most broadband users currently receive only 256 kilobits per second – 100 times less capacity than 25 megabits – using ADSL technology.

As @reana points out on Twitter, many people subscribe to 256kbps services, HOWEVER if they’ve got access to 256k they’ve got access to 1.5mbps, and even up to 8mbps now on many ADSL 1 lines (my folks in Country WA on pair gains miles from the exchange just went to 8mbp on ADSL1). To say that 256kbps is currently what’s available is complete BS (it’s a choice, not a restriction) and nothing more than Government spin, and it’s lazy reporting from the SMH to repeat the line from the Government.

It’s also not a great sign in terms of Government direction. When I saw 100x times I automatically through 100mbps or similar, the sorts of speeds they should be talking about. Instead the Government is spinning old tech while the rest of the world goes to 100mbps, or as we saw in Japan last week, the start of 1.2gbps. So much for a new Government offering new directions.

And the headline: “lightning internet speeds,” there’s nothing lightning about 25mbps. It whole article sounds and reads light a Government press release (and I know from experience).

Given when I first traveled to the United States in November 2006 I came home to a $998 Optus bill, I’ve been really, really shy on subsequent trips about using my mobile for anything. The roaming charges on Optus are insanely expensive, some calls are $2.50 a minute, and for memory it’s $1.30 to receive calls or similar.

Given I’m State side for 2 weeks this trip (I’ve been here a week as I write this) I ventured down the pre-paid local sim card route. T-Mobile offered the best deal…but has no coverage at TC central in Atherton, which left me with AT&T only (of the 4 major telcos in the US, 2 offer GSM, 2 offer CDMA, the iPhone is GSM).

First the travelers tip. I needed a way to divert my phone to a US number without the massive expense of Optus international. So this is what I did.

1. Buy a Skype-in number for Australia. In my case it was an 03 Melbourne number as the wife is already there and I’ll be based there soon (we’re half the way through moving to Melbourne).

2. Divert Optus mobile number to the 03 number. I think it was something like 25c/ min or less.

3. Divert the Skype-in number to the AT&T sim. Skype charges about 3c a minute for the diverted call.

Now the AT&T pre-paid card charges 25c USD a minute to receive calls, expensive, but it works out at about 50-60c a minute to take a call made to my original number, as opposed to $1.25 / minute or more if I just used the Optus sim on global roaming. Most importantly, the diverted call counts again my plan, where as internation roaming would be extra, so that 60c might be less that 35c/ minute in actual costs to me.

Now back to AT&T. I’d been in one of their stores previously with Marty Wells of Tangler, so I knew it was going to be bad. It still was. Whereas a Telstra shop is always busy (at least the one in Bunbury is) and you often have to wait, but you queue for that, AT&T works on a door greater/ take your name basis. So you enter the store and the store greater puts your name on a list and you wait to be called. My trip this time took 20 minutes to be called despite the store not being that busy, it’s that slow. Buying the SIM card wasn’t that hard when I was eventually called, and I had a number.

Nearly a week later and the pre-paid SIM has run out. I only bought $25 worth of credit and you pay 25c/ min for incoming and outgoing calls, that and data at 1c a kb…and of course with an iPhone it’s hard to avoid data.

So I went to the AT&T Palo Alto store today. There’s a machine that looks like an ATM that allows you to top up your credit. I swipe my Australian Visa (debit) and nothing, wont work. Try again, nothing. I’ve just got enough for the min $15 USD top up so I feed the money into the machine, then wait…and wait…and wait. “Communications error” and a printed receipt saying I should dial through the number on the receipt for a credit. I didn’t want to wait 30 minutes to talk to someone directly?Ǭ† (this time it was really busy) so I left. Got back, dialed the number, entered the number on the receipt. “This is an invalid number”. Try two more times, same response.

So I call AT&T customer service. I can’t emphasise enough how much further call centre “voice recognition” has advanced in the US as compared to Australia. 5 minutes of telling the machine what I wanted. Told the wait is 60 seconds, then 10 minutes later I speak to someone. After repeating myself 5 times (apparently my Australian accent is difficult to understand) I’m told that I’ve got the wrong department, and I’d be transfered. Get transfered to a message that says you’ve called out of hours, please call a special after hours number if you still need help. Called that number…it wasn’t AT&T’s number, unless I wrote it down wrong.

So despite already having a credit I decide to try the website because I want a working mobile. Type my details into the website, they want the billing address for the Visa, I put it in and get an error message telling me I have to select a state, despite the drop down only offering “Australia -other” and trying to select it over and over and over again.

End of the day I’ve got a useless phone until I call AT&T in the morning, so don’t try and ring me. I’ll also promise to never criticize Telstra customer service again. Despite there many failings, I’ve always been able to speak to a real person who could help me when I’ve needed it with Telstra (our home landline is with Telstra), AT&T on the other hand makes them look brilliant. I guess anything like this should always be in context, and now I’ve seen the worst.

I WANT I WANT I WANT I WANT I WANT

6.8mb download, under 3 seconds. 1mb, so quick I didn’t see the download bar. 30mb ftp upload, minutes

The results are in and it’s wall to wall Labor for Australia. On one hand I’m deeply disturbed; the thought of returning to the days of Hawke and Keating with high interest rates and high unemployment scare me, and yet the Howard Government bought this on themselves. Work choices was bad politics, the legislation went too far, and beyond all else it’s what cost the Government votes; the irony of course being that Australia has chucked out its Government at a time when Australia has never looked so good.

Moving forward we need to demand an ICT policy from the Rudd Labor Government. The Liberals never had one so I guess Rudd couldn’t Me-too it, but there is hope. The Libs were lost in the woods when it came to tech, I’m hoping that Labor wont be. Secondly we need to stop the Great Firewall of Australia. Mandatory internet censorship is not acceptable, neither is the increased costs such a scheme will force onto Australian internet users when we already have the most expensive and crap broadband in the developed world.

Overall I’m hoping that the Rudd Government is a glass half full at the moment, and despite being a former Liberal Party Member (2 years cured) I’m looking forward to seeing what’s ahead, and seeing whether they’ve cured themselves of their past follys and really are a party for the 21st century.