|
July 5, 2009
Last week I spent a few days down at Victor Harbor. The weather was delightful: still, sunny, temperate and lightly overcast. Winters are becoming warmer as a result of the effects of climate change. As a result we were able to spend some time hanging out in delightful places:
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Ari and Agtet, The Bluff, Victor Harbor, 2009
The downside of relaxing at Victor Harbor is the internet : it is a blackspot with backhaul problems, due to Telstra's monopoly, which means that Telstra can effectively set the pricing and control the speed. So the connections are slow and expensive. Most music video streams from YouTube keep on breaking up, Flickr is slow to load, and some reports with pdf files take forever to download.
I read that the Federal government’s recent $250 million backhaul programme named the six areas for “priority rollout” of the national broadband network (NBN) and these include Victor Harbor. The areas are: Emerald and Longreach in Queensland, Geraldton in Western Australia, Darwin in the Northern Territory, Broken Hill in New South Wales, Victor Harbor in South Australia and South West Gippsland in Victoria.
Backhaul refers to moving large aggregate volumes of data between locations and it refers to the connection between major data aggregation points like exchanges and overseas cables. That means cheaper pricing but not increased speed because the connection between the house and the Victor Harbor exchange remains unchanged. That will only change with fibre to the home (FTTH).
Will the extra backhaul cable to Adelaide be underground? Or strung between powerlines? I hope for the former but suspect the latter.
With highspeed broadband starting to be built we can focus on the applications and the services--on what do we use the network for? It is the latter----the digital economy---that is unclear, even though we know that competition will move from the present artificially controlled price model to the kinds of services and applications each operator (ISP) will offer.
The current talk is about:
operators offering the services they want and are prepared to pay for — entertainment, information, business applications, games, movies, music, and services (some government, others commercial) such as health care and education.....But most of the services that will populate the FTTH network and propagate its use have yet to be set up, and many more have yet to be conceived.
Internet television is one possibility that would be welcome as it would open up more spaces beyond the old newspaper media.
Another is the way that local photographers are putting their work online and commenting on it and the conditions of production.
|
