The Buzz is all Broadband

Image by Brett L. via FlickrFrom Reuters:

Australia has slower and more expensive Internet access than many other developed countries, and though penetration rates are on a par, officials and experts have warned Australia may fall behind in competitiveness without faster, nationwide coverage.

They're not telling anyone in Australia anything new. Expensive broadband with poor service has come to be expected. Leading the race to the bottom is the company that can most affect service: Telstra.
There is even a term: fraudband, to describe ADSL service sold for too much but slower than dialup.
Some people in the technical field consider all Australian ADSL service fraudband because of the coverage maps. Coverage maps are published online (supposedly) showing where ADSL in different versions is available. There are two problems with the maps:

1. Commonly where coverage is shown, the telephone exchanges are too far away. Although full service is indicated within 4km of an exchange, past 1.3km or so, the quality (read: speed and reliablity) drops off dramatically.
2. The out of date, or just poorly wired, exchanges are full. ADSL may be offered in an area, but you take out a lottery ticket to get service. Some homes almost next door to an exchange have waited over a year.

IHT picked up on the story:

Australia could be a step closer to building a high-speed broadband network after the government canceled a deal for a rural system that would have overlapped with the one planned nationwide. The scrapping of the rural network plan, which was to cost 958 million Australian dollars, or $888 million, came as the government planned to invite bids for a national network as early as next week.

Hate to tellya, folks, but that's been going on for more than 5 years.
The government has commissioned Telstra to provide outdated service to regional (rural) areas, then realized the service would conflict with other plans - wasting years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Regional users are forced from one flaky plan to the next (CDMA to NextG is the latest.) and still have dropouts and poor service.
The government has looked to private enterprise to pick up some of the slack by offering grants and special loans. Satellite service and free service expands too quickly for these small firms to keep up. One abandoned network is cobbled onto the next, creating a nightmare for customers and those companies that took the bait.

Like the old AT&T in the US, Telstra is great at the big projects:

Australian telecommunications company Telstra has begun the arduous task of laying a 9,000 km undersea internet cable from Australia to Hawaii.

Again, that's not the whole story. Telstra is laying that cable, not out of social consciousness or entrepreneurial zeal, but out of monopolistic necessity. Telstra has been buying bandwidth from old rival Optus for years.

If you can't even get email, why bother to open up a business online? An inspiring example is as passion for beauty.
There is no question some companies have braved the madness and succeeded though. Relatively, for a country that needs reliable communications from coast to coast like no other, Australia has made the road to success unnecessarily hard.
There are many words to describe the slosh of media in one direction then the next, with only miniscule real progress: most of them 4-letter words.

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey.

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Oh, those competition-crazed aussies

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey.

Competition-crazy Aussies hain't got no chance (already)

IF THE race has started to develop really fast broadband in the Asia-Pacific area, Australia has already all but lost, a leading telecommunications analyst says.

And if that situation is to change, the Government has to encourage investment in taking optical fibre cables not just to street corner nodes, but all the way to homes, he says. (The Age)

No kidding. Most of us in the technology and media trades have been saying that for .. 5-7 years?
Leith Campbell makes a legitimate point though: "..The political will to invest in broadband isn't there..." Political will? Australia has politicized a fear of the Internet. Internet-phobic as become a syndrome of every election.

Helen Coonan has illustrated repeatedly that she is lost when it comes to understanding the Internet. The numbers seem meaningless to her. Even easy ideas such as the rest of Asia, US and Europe already enjoying broadband speeds of 100 times or more what is available here, seem to just make her eyes glaze.

Telstra has called on the Minister for Communications, Senator Helen Coonan, to cease and desist distributing misleading and incorrect information, and is demanding she put the record straight.

In letters being sent out to 500,000 households throughout the country spruiking the Government's OPEL sweetheart deal, the Minister is incorrectly claiming there is no wireless broadband service in areas where Telstra's Next G™ wireless broadband service is clearly available. (07 Sept)

Telstra went out to the addresses the Minister complains about, and found broadband available. One city she mentioned had been funded for broadband through her own Communications Ministry!

And, the raving debate, - like hyenas to a corpse - rages on: the ACCC has been accused of retarding investment in infrastructure by imposing upon Telstra to share its infrastructure network cheaply.

The ACCC's justification for giving competitors cheap access to Telstra's copper lines was the "stepping stone" theory - allowing new entrants to gain sufficient marketshare to invest in their own infrastructure as they step up the "ladder of investment". That theory has been completely shot down - if the evidence of the low levels of telecommunications investment in the chart below wasn't enough.

The fact that government leadership failed for years to cause the problem doesn't seem to be a popular topic. Or is just that soppy-eyed leadership is taken for granted? Maybe a little more coffee will help...
Sheesh, how am I supposed to make a peddling websites in Australia? Folks gotta be able to see them first. Sphere: Related Content

Telstra takes to the mattresses (or blogs)

Telstra has drecided to join the rest of the blogging world. In the usual Telstra style, the new blogs are professional looking and full of user-unfriendly bugs. A massive array of corporate blogs, all carefully edited to put the company's best foot forward.
Too bad the company's policies prevent most of the country from joining the free world.

Buggy
Most of my customers are small businesses. SME's (Small- to Medium-sized Enterprises to the rest of the world); "small business" to the ATO. Considering that these businesses employ 85% of the workforce and are 96.4% of the registered businesses in Australia, I was particularly dismayed to find the new 'Small Business' blogger was the former soppy 'Lifestyles' blogger.
She goes on and on about her fascination of the insects she calls 'nerds', but the nerds at Telstra have their revenge: neither the RSS feed nor the Comments on her blog work. (She may not want the Comments to work.)
You can almost hear the gnomes chuckling.

You have to read the news like a conversation.
When the person blogging about small business in Australia keeps citing studies done by large retailers in the US; and calling Internet entrepreneurs "nerds", it's not hard to conclude she wishes she lived somewhere else. (Hint: She certainly needs to work somewhere else...)
One thing is certain: She has little or no idea what it means to develop the Internet as a resource for a small business in Australia.

Her first article was for 'Breast Cancer Day' at the Telstra Dome. Laudable, but hardly 'News you can use'. (A leftover from her former project?) She is far out of touch with the needs of small business in Australia.

A few of the other blogs have undefined RSS feeds, too. And Telstra wonders why it's losing money? I did find a useable feed on the homepage.

Comments
There are 4 separate blogs complaining about the regulatory requirement to keep CDMA in place until the NextG network is running properly. The blogs are full of people complaining about holes in service. The chief technical blogger advises getting a magnetic antenna; and one comment says it will make a nice paperweight.
No one dares complain about the fees. (I guess they leave that to the Dodo ad.)
Telstra whinges on to make its case. All Telstra has to do is explain that they want to cripple their competitors and are willing to leave 1/2 the population without reliable broadband.
Strangely, most of the Comments on these blogs seem to be Telstra shareholders. The shareholders want to know why Telstra shouldn't be allowed to make the same obscene profits as steel companies.

CDMA divine
Optus, iiNet, and other carriers in the G9 consortium built their business by sharing Telstra's CDMA network. This was mandated by regulations in order to introduce competition into the market. Only 10 years ago, Telstra was a monopoly. The only game in town.
When Telstra dragged its feet (for 7 years overcharging consumers for piss-poor broadband) on the issue of fibre cabling and then wireless internet access, 9 of these companies formed a consortium, excluding Telstra, and filed a competing proposal to do the work.
Here would be a chance for Telstra to let them know why they shouldn't mess with the Mother Country (..or Mother Nature, or God, etc.)
CDMA will go sooner or later. Telstra probably intended to handle the changeover as they did ADSL: charge heavily for the NextG service as it was grudgingly enabled. This is one case where the politicians should be applauded.

When you read these blogs as a conversation along with the other blogs on these topics, the Telstra gang seems to want to dominate the discussion to put the party line forward. The internet marketing of these blogs seem to be towards Telstra shareholders and employees, too, which skews the tone of the response.
I suppose all's fair in love and war, or business, but as an interested observer, you do get tired of seeing people ground up in the conflict.
Until broadband improves to the point small business can see the efficacy of the Internet, SEO and SEM will only be valuable tools for the privileged few.

Notes:
CDMA -- (Code Division Multiple Access): A technology for digital transmission of radio signals between, for example, a mobile telephone and a radio base station. In CDMA, a frequency is divided into a number of codes. A spread spectrum approach to digital transmission. With CDMA, each conversation is digitized and then tagged with a code. Also known as IS-95A or cdmaOne

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