Forget YouTube, Australia's fraud-band makes online video a pipe dream

Adam Turner
Friday, 23 February 2007 20:23

Opinion and Analysis

Forget watching movies on YouTube or downloaded to your PlayStation 3 - many Australians on so-called broadband barely have the capacity to check their email thanks to Telstra.

Australia's Minister for Communications, Senator Helen Coonan, recently crowed about the fact more Australians are subscribing to broadband than dial-up. She was citing the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Internet Activity Survey, but she conveniently ignored the fact that what Australia (ie Telstra) calls broadband is considered glorified dial-up by the rest of the world.

According to the survey, 34 per cent of Australian homes with broadband are on pitiful 256Kbps connections. To make matters worse, most of these homes would be Telstra BigPond customers stuck with pathetic 200MB monthly download limits. Even BigPond's next plan up only offers 400MB per month at 1500Kbps (for a long time it was at 512Kbps). This is fraud-band, 200MB works out at 6.66MB a day - which is barely enough to check your email let alone do anything interesting like internet telephony or video on demand.

Unbelievably, BigPond charges $29.95 a month for this crap, with phenomenal excess data fees of $150 per GB. To add insult to injury, it even counts your uploads towards your monthly limit. For the same price from almost any other Australian DSL provider you can get at least 4GB, 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.

If the government wants to fix broadband in this country, it should start by banning ISPs like BigPond from selling plans offering less than 3GB per month in downloads and 512Kbps download speeds.

BigPond's 200MB and 400MB plans have destroyed broadband in Australia. By locking people into such pathetic plans, Telstra is suffocating innovation and competing businesses. Thanks to BigPond, many homes lack the download speeds or monthly download allowance to do any of the things that make high speed internet access worth having. This of course means there's little point in companies offering services such as Video on Demand because hardly anyone can use them.

BigPond has its own BigPond Movies download service, so how does it manage when many of its customers don't have the monthly data allowance to download even one movie? CONTINUED