Tech Explorer

I’ve been subscribed to the feed for the GigaOm website for a while now, and there have been some interesting stories. Two that caught my eye recently, as I worked my way through a backlog of unread items in my aggregator were:

1. California Wants Better Broadband
2. U.S. Makes the Best Use of Its Broadband

The interesting bit about the first article is that “Currently about 44 percent of the state’s [California] broadband users don’t have access to speeds above 10mbps (nationwide the average speed is 9mbps, according to the report)”. It made me wonder how many Australian users have access to speeds above 10mbps? Or even how many have access to the average speed of 9mbps?

Now, I’m not just talking about the ability to have a connection. That’s a technical limitation. For proper access I’m talking about the ability for people to have access to these speeds that is affordable. A very different thing and a distinction that I think often gets lost.

I’d even settle for getting the true 1.5mbps out of my existing ADSL subscription. A combination of wiring in my house, I’m renting so I can’t do much about that, and infrastructure issues between my house and exchange mean I never get the true speed I’m paying for.

The second article gave me some hope though when I saw in the graph that we came seventh in the ranking for best utilisation of the bandwidth we do have. The article says:

A new report ranking broadband connectivity argues that it’s not how much you have but what you do with it. And according to the Connectivity Scorecard, no one is doing enough. Instead of measuring bandwidth speed or how much people pay to get connected, the report throws that information into the mix with data such as literacy rates, enterprise use and services offered via broadband to deliver two sets of rankings.

So what does this mean? We may not have the fastest broadband in the world, or the cheapest, but what we do have we’re using well with room for improvement.

It will be interesting to watch the outcome of the Federal Governments FTTN national network. Particularly in light of recent developments with our international Internet capacity and the Pipe Networks PPC-1 initiative.