The phrase "reasonable level of broadband service" should be ringing alarm bells for anyone familiar with the pathetic state of broadband in Australia. Many city-dwelling Australians on so-called broadband barely have the capacity to check their email thanks to Telstra. A third of Australian homes with broadband are on pitiful 256Kbps connections, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Such speeds are considered glorified dial-up by the rest of the world.

According to Coonan; "Wherever you are living in Australia, if you can’t access a terrestrial broadband service at a reasonable price and service quality you will qualify for the Australian Broadband Guarantee". No one in their right mind could describe Telstra's broadband services as at a "reasonable price".

Most of Australia's homes on 256Kbps connections would be Telstra BigPond customers with pathetic 200MB monthly download limits - that's a measly 6.66MB a day. To make matters worse, BigPond customers are charged for uploads and slugged with horrendous excess data charges. For the same price from almost any other Australian DSL provider you can get at least 4GB per month, with $3 per GB for excess data and your uploads not included. Unfortunately many of BigPond's competitors have been forced to introduce budget plans to compete, meaning even more people end up with "fraud-band".

Such restrictions are choking broadband in Australia, yet Telstra obviously considers it a "reasonable level of broadband service" at a "reasonable price". Coonan is very vague as to what a "reasonable level of broadband service" entails, although some of the documentation refers to a "metro-comparable broadband service". Some city-dwellers have access to cable (up to 10Mbps) and ADSL2+ (up to 24Mbps), but don't expect the Australian Broadband Guarantee to deliver this kind of access.

All this is a case of too little, too late. The Australian Broadband Guarantee aims to deliver the speeds non-metro Australians should have had several years ago. The wording of the guarantee - insisting the telcos providing the services should be "establishing new access infrastructure" rather than modify existing services and infrastructure - ensures that Telstra will win the bulk of the work. So country-folk will get the same crap from Telstra as city-folk, which I guess could be considered fair.

If the government wants to fix broadband in this country, the first thing it can do is ban ISPs like BigPond from selling plans offering less than 3GB per month in downloads and 512Kbps download speeds - to ensure people have connections they can actually use.

The second thing it can do is stop the squabbling over building a national Fibre to the Node network. After the government stood back and let the telcos screw up Australia's cable internet rollout, there's a danger of the same thing happening again. Telstra and a consortium of its competitors are both bluffing about plans to build a Fibre to the Node network in order to force the other's hand. It's a high stakes game and they're gambling with Australia's future - but no-one seems to have the guts to step in and sort it out for the good of the country rather than the good of the shareholders.{moscomment}