Tuesday 22 June 2010

Australian vs UK broadband plans

A new coworker who has just moved back to Oz from the UK told me he had trouble adjusting to the internet plans here, and when he told me the deal he had, I was floored. The equivalent of $10 Australian per month for 24Mbps and no download limits. For comparison, I pay 4 times that for less than half the speed and (if it was downloading non-stop all month) about 1/125th the effective download cap.

So what's making Australian internet plans suck out loud by comparison with the rest of the world? I'll grant they're getting better, and if the National Broadband Network ever gets past the politics stage we might do better. Still, I want to find whatever is holding us back and hurt it a little.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We're begging for unlimited downloads here.
PPS - Meanwhile, in the USA, the unlimited plans might be on the way out.

4 comments:

Miv said...

At the risk of trotting out the same old lines, population density plays a massive part in relation to infrastructure planning.

The UK may have vastly superior plans, but they also fit our entire population into a single city and a greater country (UK vs England) population of 60 million in roughly a quarter of the space of Queensland.

The quantity of copper or fiber used bay be similar however the costs of providing this are very different.

John said...

Yeah, true. And I suppose if I had to trade our wide open spaces for slightly faster broadband, I'd choose the former.

Beard said...

http://www.aapt-broadband.com.au/unlimited-broadband-music-downloads/24-7-unlimited-bundle

Unlimited broadband. one of the only companies that does it in australia.

John said...

Good to know, but it's still 10x the cost of that UK plan.