Australian Internet: good, but not good enough?

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 09 December 2009 11:18

Your IT - Home IT

Virtual office provider Servcorp International reckons Australia has the fourth best Internet service in the world. But we're still not satisfied.

A survey of 7500 business people in 24 countries  for virtual office provider Servcorp found the top five countries in terms of Internet service are (in order) the US, Japan, Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong.

Over 80% of respondents said they had used the Internet in a different country, so it seems reasonable to assume that they were providing an informed opinion.

Even though Australia fared well on this measure, Australian respondents were not especially impressed. While 11.7% of respondents rated the Internet service they receive as excellent in comparison with the rest of the world, only 4.6% of Australians said the same.

And where 17.4% of all respondents rated their Internet service as below average (or worse) the corresponding figure for Australians was 20.4%.

Consequently, 85.4% of Australians thought the government should invest more in Internet infrastructure (which could be interpreted as wide support for the NBN). Worldwide, almost four out of five respondents wanted more government investment - so much for business's belief in free markets?

Similarly, Australians were more likely to agree that there should be better regulation of telecommunications companies and more incentives for businesses to improve the Internet, and less likely to call for more competition.

Download limits seem to be a particular sticking point among Australians, with one in seven describing the limits as poor. Conversely, one in five rated them as excellent.

Australian ISPs were better regarded for reliability and (to a slightly lesser extent) security.

Servcorp did not say who carried out the research or how the respondents were selected.

"It is disappointing to see that 20.4% of Australians believe the internet service in this country is below average, bad or terrible," said Marcus Moufarrige, Servcorp's CIO and general manager of South East Asia.

"There is a great opportunity for us as a nation to improve our internet systems. There is no reason why we can't be leading the way with in the virtual world alongside the USA, Japan and Singapore," he added.