The US broadband infrastructure isn't wonderful. If you live in a large city, your broadband options are good. If you live in a smaller town, you probably have at least one option for broadband (cable or DSL), albeit expensive. I lived in a small town and they charged something like $80/month for a 5mbps cable line because they could, they had no competition. And if you're out in a rural area outside of a town or city, likely your only option is dial up or satellite (which is expensive, slow and capped).
same sort of situation over here. there is tons of competition in the cities where other companies have access to the exchange. the problem is that in the rural areas, there is one company that owns basically every exchange (Telstra) - they used to be a government owned company but now are private. they are purely after profits, as any business is, which i understand. but it sholdnt be allowed for an internet company.
we can get ADSL2+ in our area (the fastest in the country basically), but we can only go on a Telstra plan, or a company that has made a deal with Telstra (prices are the same though). $100 a month for 25GB of data - downloads AND uploads included. its a RIP.
i should also point out that companies dont have volatile pricing, if its $100/mon in the city, its $100/mon in the country (if you can get it)!
I think people see things like Comcast advertising speeds such as 100mbps and think that it's like that all over the US; it's not.
never seen that advertised, but i personally know that its not going to be the deal. im not stupid
Ok so Australia doesn't have the perfect setup, granted, but at the same time you also don't have it bad.
$100 a month for 25GB usage? seems bad to me when a lot of people in the US dont even have caps! im not even going to compare to South Korea, Thailand, China, Japan etc because it just gets depressing
Australia has one big benefit in that a full roll out to 8 cities/metro areas covers a pretty large% of the populaion. The downside is that it is excessively expensive to cover the remainder when there is little demand.
what they SHOULD have done, was plan FTTH for all the metrol/semi-regional areas (thats me hehe) - then give the rural areas VDSL2. FTTH can go infinitely high (>300mbps) and the VDSL2 hits around 100mbps. great! id be fine with that! but i think they are trying to do fibre everywhere for now. meh who knows what they are doing, i dont even think they know!
anyway, the result is going to be MASSIVELY high prices. an estimation by an independent reviewer said that if 80% of current broadband switchers trade to this new network, $200 a month will be the basic price! f*ck that, seriously.
Also, don't forget that Australia has location issues in the sense that alot of internet traffic goes out of the country and laying a few thousand km/miles of cable in the ocean to boost speeds is no simple task.
they have already been laid of course, but it probably wont be enough. one of the newest, faster lines has about 2tb/s. but imagine if everybody had +100mbps, that line would be overloaded by a large street! let alone another 20,000,000 people.
i cant wait for 4G, its already 5x faster then the fastest plans you can get on ADSL. pathetic.