Adventure Ausrama Blog

Technology: Telstra is being dishonest and is treating Australian consumers like fools. Telstra is doing something that the federal government did not foresee. The telco is only using half of the nation's copper wiring originally laid a century ago. In Australia there are two pairs of telephone wires in the cable laid to each house. This was to enable each house to have two telephone connections. The system worked well with ADSL: each phone could have its separate modem and ADSL service. With the NBN this has all changed. When the NBN began its roll out it allowed Telstra to set the rules. Telstra chose the rule: ONE PROPERTY ONE NBN CONNECTION. This is fine if you have a detached house. However, if you have a granny flat that has its own phone because the main telephone line has been split at the box on the house, one line will be scrapped and will no longer be used. It will lay dead in the ground forever due to Telstra's policy. Furthermore, if you rent out...

Netflix came to Australia and within a few months the entertainment landscape changed. All of the major free-to-air televisions stations now offer movie and program downloads at an exceedingly low monthly rate. Foxtel reduced the prices of some of its packages by 60 per cent. The Internet market per se is about to be hit as well. MyRepublic is coming to Australia. It has heavily condemned Telstra for its lacklustre provision of broadband Internet via the National Broadband Network (NBN). The Singaporean company will invest in its own network and provide super-fast broadband at prices lower than Telstra. The offer of 100 megabit per second at $80 a month is at the low end of Telstra much slower offer. The copper to homes from the node will hamper Telstra Mr Rodrigues of My Republic says. He says the government has been lying all along about the NBN's ultimate speed. Just about every Australian believes that the NBN rollout is a mess. It is the target of ongoing jo...

Development of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) has been a disaster. Mismanagement by governments run by both major parties are at fault. The Coalition won office on the promise to clean up the mess and speed things up. Currently, the roll out is slowing down and it is still in a mess. Neither party knows how to manage a punch-up in a pub. Australia is falling down the international ranking of broadband efficiency. Industry is waiting for it to be working Australia wide. Completion will probably be 2030. The technology will be superseded by then and the investment will be a waste of money. There are pockets of users with fast broadband in the country. This is causing frustration and anger from those who cannot get it. Some people are actually buying houses in areas already covered. The poor miss out yet again. The Coalition has been accused of bypassing Labor electorates. This is disgraceful behavior. Leaving wire connections from the node was ...

Netflix will provide 4K streaming services in Australia from March next year. Just how successful this will be is questionable Broadband is poor for the majority of Australians with suburban Aussies mostly on 200 GB of download space at ADSL2 speed. This is insufficient for 4K. You will have to pay a high premium to Netflix to get it as well. Few will pay more for less, so few will buy 4K televisions to get it. Personally, I feel it is a bad business judgement. You can't sell travel tickets before the railway is built and it will be at least a decade before Australian broadband is even adequate. Like all the other Internet companies Netflix will spy on you, offering new content based on your history of movies watched. You will not be able to turn this "feature" off. Just about everything is available on Foxtel now and the price is falling. Spying is not possible on the Foxtel satellite TV service. In the US, Netflix has been accused of crowding out...

Culture changes steadily with technological development. Some values have their own inertia which means that they stay around for much longer. Legal adaptation to a new environment is very slow. We are living with laws suited to a pre-internet era. The Uber app took the world by storm. It spread through many countries and clashed with legal restrictions which were made for the benefit of taxi drivers and the public. Unfortunately, people do not like rapid change to the legal system. It upsets the way they live. Like the Chinese, Australians embrace new technology, much to the frustration of government. Whether it is legal or not we adopt new things. They "get in" because their is some legal framework that benefits some participants in the market place. New systems get under the barrier, so to speak. Australians seems to lead the world on illegal movie downloads. This is because the market is distorted. We pay over the odds for the latest films due to overpricing...

Telstra is claiming to have boosted mobile network speed to 450Mbps over LTE. Technological improvement is a good thing, but it should get its house in order first. About every three days one cannot access account details notably broadband usage. Customer service is disgraceful. One thing that stands out about Telstra is that sales and payment web pages are "never" down. Even a child can see its priorities are on making money not providing a decent service that customers overpay for. It is about to bring out new packages at higher prices. Its monopoly is all-consuming. Telstra can do what it likes. Increasing mobile speed by three means increased charges for consumers. There is no doubt about this. Furthermore, faster broadband means allocated usage will be used up much sooner so Telstrs will gain there as well. With more users not using PCs multiple channel broadband data flow means greater profit. The overall deal for Telstra is more money not customer be...

Watch that computer. It could be bad for your health. Remember when complaints were rife about Wi-Fi signals damaging your brain? This charge was also aimed at mobile phones. Signals from towers were so small as to be hardly measurable. Radio and television transmissions are stronger. Home WiFi and computers generally are extremely low.  You are more likely to suffer repetitive strain injury from using a computer than brain damage. Repetitive strain is becoming a problem in all industries because computer use is so widespread. The upper-limb and neck are the danger areas. Even now though, many "experts" say the "illness" is imagined. It is difficult to prove that the injury was caused at work. People do many odd things away from work, though employment is the greatest culprit.  Like factory jobs where the same movements are repeated, data processors are likely to suffer from RSI. In the 1980s half of Telstra telephonists claimed they had RSI. Oddly, t...

It seems odd for the Government to compensate Telstra for building the National Broadband Network considering fibre optic cable is a modern version of old copper. If a rival company in the market place builds a new factory with modern equipment established firms are not paid a cent. Besides, the copper was funded by Australian citizens and not by Telstra per se . Selling Telstra was a stupid idea anyway. People who bought shares should have known that the monopoly would eventually die. Perhaps John Howard saw the writing on the wall and decided to sell it. In recent times Testra has barely made a profit so it could no longer be relied upon as a cash cow. The Australian Government is paying Telstra $11 billion in compensation. Laws should have been changed to prevent this public liability taking place. Telstra's ownership of the copper should have been changed before the sale. It's control should have been altered to protection of the copper network which was paid...

Will Australia ever have a National Broadband Network? It seems it will only be partially completed before the Coalition wins the next election and puts a red line through it all. Telstra will remain the controlling body when NBN .com takes over. Not much will change in Australia's communication sector. Those who miss out will be terribly bitter about the mish -mash of a system we are left with. Just why the Coalition hates the NBN is hard to clarify. Why don't they want the nation to move forward with a world-class Internet network? Telstra is being criticized for being too competitive in price cutting. There is not much profit left for small telcos . Surely, this is the way of the market, but is Telstra trying to "grab" the market before it gains control over a market that will be opened up again with a coalition win? Telstra will survive a re-adjustment when smaller firms will fail. The Labor Government sees the deal "done" and a majority ...

It looks like Labor will lose the election. One thing is of great concern to me. That is the loss of the new national broadband network. Tony Abbot believes that private enterprise will fill the gap and make the leap. Without new technology this will not happen, particularly as Telecom still controls the copper wire network. The recent American CEO of Telecom did have one thing right about the Australian communication market - one company is shackled to the government but it still controls the whole market. Literally, when Telstra sneezes all the minor telcos don't just get a cold: they get the flu. Ironically, a public company holds the one and only key to Australia's hope of catching up to the rest of the developed world. CSIRO has developed a way of high-speed computer data transmission in the 6 gigabite range. It is not only superior to existing Wifi , developed in Australia, it is 99.9 per cent loss free, that is, it doesn't lose anything to a cable connection....