Bazz: "Instead of a page coming down in 2.000 secs it might arrive in 1.999 secs. If you are lucky it might arrive in 1.99 seconds."

That shows a distinct lack of imagination, Bazz. What makes you think the predominate traffic over the Internet in the future will be web pages? Actually, its worse than that. Bugger the future. Right now web traffic - ie displaying web pages, constitutes roughly 20% of internet traffic. So how long a web page takes to load is all a bit irrelevant, even now.

Which brings me back to many of the comments made here. There are persistent claims a faster Internet will make no difference to how it is used. But these claims are being made by people who evidently don't know what good uses the existing Internet can be put to now, so what hope is there of them imagining what new uses a faster Internet could be put to?

I use broadband, dial-up (very infrequently now) and wireless. The broadband is definitely superior to the wireless, but for most purposes I notice very little difference between any of them.

Yeah, I wince when someone sends me a large file and I'm on dial-up, cancel the email download and use webmail instead. But I've had the experience of wireless, theoretically capable of 7.2 mbps being slower than dial-up in some parts of country New South Wales.

Even back here in metropolitan Brisbane my wireless is variable. Yet, when we had to wait for our ADSL connection to be reestablished when we moved office we powered the whole office off my Optus Wireless Broadband connection and no-one complained.

It's a relief to be back on ADSL2+, but again, apart from some of the back-ups that we do of external servers there is no noticeable difference to how we were travelling with the wireless broadband (and I notice little difference between now and when we were on slower ADSL speeds).

I take Bazz's point about server speed too.

I wonder however whether the government's strategy, apart from covering up the debacle of the original policy, is to force Telstra et al to roll-out faster broadband themselves so that the government will eventually pull the plug on this policy as well. Or alternatively to encourage Telstra to agree to splitting itself into an infrastructure arm and a retailer it would end up being a spectularly successful policy.

I did have a similar thought Graham. If this were a game of poker, I'd think that Rudd was bluffing and he's just tricked Telstra into folding, when actually, that stunning four-of-a-kind was merely a respectable straight.

It seems that Telstra are now looking amenable to splitting their retail and wholesale divisions, something they've been loathe to do over the last few terms.

However, as brilliant a move as it would seem, I can't quite believe that Rudd would be playing politics on that level - simply put, he'd have to back down later, and even if this was an intentional move he'd either have to admit to deceiving the public in order to bluff Telstra, or making an incompetent announcement.

I can't see him doing either.

I can only concur with rstuart's comments. Having been overseas for some time now, I can see how far Australia has fallen behind in terms of our internet speeds.

To me, there is no doubt at all that the uses for the internet will increase along with the increased speeds.
We're often held back by lowest common denominators, but near-universal access (even if there's a significant minority, this it wouldn't affect this development provided it's a minority) would mean that trade, advertising, entertainment and all the associated things would be capable of moving forward.

This isn't just about web pages and downloads.

Projected fees are somewhat misleading and premature.

This kind of technology will supercede all basic telephony with VOIP and Pay TV via satellite and introduce things like video-on-demand for the consumer and conferencing for business.

The telephony cost will no longer be distance based but probably charged as data volume.

There will probably be a basic access fee (like water, electricity and current phone line rental)but many of the current things you may be paying for will be absorbed. Our access is comparatively expensive due in part to the infrastructure limitations. The existing network is being shared by all the carriers and resellers.

It's not just speed - it's the amount of traffic that we will need to cope with.

Imagine what it would be like if we were stll using 52kB dial-up nationwide - back to the World-Wide-Wait.

As for wireless, the more the number of users connected to a transmitter, the lower the average speed and the smaller the cell radius.

You may log on at high speed early in the morning but be prepared for a speed reduction during peak times plus potential loss of coverage and drop-outs.

Raiche, the wireless speed was brilliant at some times over Easter, until the rain came. I was downloading pods at one stage a 1 Mbps. So I take your point on wireless. But isn't that also true of fibre and everything else - the more users the slower they go?

GrahamY: "But isn't that also true of fibre and everything else - the more users the slower they go?"

No, not really. I guess its obvious the bandwidth available in a single wireless cell is fixed. In a 3G cell it is very roughly 4 Mbps, so Telstra says you can get 3.2 Mbps in a NextG cell. You get that if you are the only user, but if there are 3 users, each will get about 1 Mbps. Equally obviously if you service that same cell with land lines the bandwidth available is not fixed, but rather increases as you add users. In the case of the NBN, each line adds 100 Mbps. There is a minimum size for a wireless cell, so this is a real and fundamental limitation.

This is why magazine reviews of 3G wireless changed. When 3 and later Optus brought out the cheap wireless plans, the reviews were almost raves about how well they worked. Over the 12 months that followed those reviews became increasingly negative. Those rave reviews attracted users, and the additional users killed the performance. There is no easy fix, particular in the inner city where the cell size is already small.

I presume you weren't concerned by that, but rather the backhaul at the exchange. Yes, that is shared, but the economics are totally different. You can see it isn't the limiting factor by just looking at the NBN proposal. The money is being spent where the bottleneck is, and that ain't at the exchange. The reality is the cost of putting in cables is dominated by digging trenches and erecting poles - not by cable you put in them. The telco's knew that when they replaced their backbones years ago with fibre. They filled those trenches are filled with unused (aka "dark") fibre. The cost of lighting those fibres is very cheap compared to the rest of the NBN. What's more the cost per bit drops as you pump more bits into the existing ones. A laser that pushes bits 10 times faster doesn't cost 10 times as much.