Election rant 5: Can we even use a Terabyte a month?

Renai LeMay
Thursday, 19 August 2010 14:15

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

ZDNet.com.au columnist David Braue has committed to write one technology-related election rant for each business day until the Federal Election on August 21. But elections are above all, a debate between two sides. So Delimiter is going to match his seven rants '” day by day - providing an alternative devil's advocate point of view.

opinion Australia's telecommunications industry at the moment is characterised by just one overriding narrative: The need for 'more'.

More speeds '” A National Broadband Network that delivers 1Gbps speeds instead of 100Mbps. More spending - $27 billion or $6 billion, depending on who wins the election on Saturday, on top of the billions that the private sector has already spent in the past half-decade. And, yesterday, more monthly quota '” with the announcement of terabyte monthly broadband plans, adding to existing 'unlimited' offerings.

The mobile sector is no different. Telstra has already successfully demonstrated speeds of up to 100Mbps over its Next G network using Long Term Evolution technology. And Optus and VHA are not far behind. Quotas are also following - as the recent iPhone 4 and mobile broadband quota wars have demonstrated.

And yet, I cannot help but feel that, as the current trend towards decluttered and simplified lifestyles has told us, more is not always, well '¦ more.

You see, surrounding almost all of the recent telco price revamps and speed upgrades has floated an aura of disbelief. A sneaking suspicion that much of the announcements have been little more than marketing fluff, designed to make consumers feel they need everything to be faster, better, fatter - that all of this will somehow make them '¦ happier.

Yesterday's announcement by iiNet and Primus of terabyte broadband plans was the perfect example of this. No sooner had iiNet revealed its terabyte temptation than a debate had kicked off - amongst the most bandwidth-hungry denizens of Twitter, no less - about the merits of such an offer.