The cost for broadband in Australia is high mainly because of the distances between population centres. I saw one report that had the phone system remained in government hands we would have had optic fibre nearly everywhere by now.

We can continue to lag behind countries like Korea if enough people make a fuss but remember, Korea is now progressing towards offering every citizen a download rate of 1GB per second.

I am close enough to an exchange to have ADSL-2 but I would love something faster than an average download rate of about 300KB.

Foyle said;
The cost for broadband in Australia is high mainly because of the distances between population centres.

Sorry Foyle you are wrong. It is an assumption many people make because
they have not thought out the detail of the installation.
There is already fibre running all over the country, to towns and cities.
One fibre, plus a backup in some cases.
The cause of the cost is the installation of the fibre from the
exchange in each town up and down every street and into every house,
into every shop, into every office,into every factory into every
hospital everywhere in that town, and repeat in every town and every
village and do it all again in every street in every city.
I think $43 billion would be a bargain.

The minister for the NBN said the other day regarding wireless, arggh.
Lets begin with a definition wireless is the system used for internet
around your house etc.

Radio is what they will use to get to farms etc and what Telstra will
install probably using vacated analogue TV channels.
Unwired has a Wimax system like that.
Range can be to the horizon plus a bit, perhaps 100km.

The minister for the NBN said that radio gets slower the further you
are from the base station.
I had to stop and think about that.
I have come to the conclusion he does not have a clue what he is talking about.
At 300,000 km per second (light speed) the difference if you double
the distance you would need an oscilloscope to see it.

I send data daily to and from the UK by radio and at 30,000 km
I have to increase the wait for a packet acknowledgement from 0.5 sec
to 1.0 second approx.
Signals travel on fibre perhaps a little slower than the speed of
light, I am not sure of that. If it is so, the minister's argument
against radio should really be used against fibre.

Beware the B artists, especially if they are politicians.

Foyle said;
I am close enough to an exchange to have ADSL-2 but I would love
something faster than an average download rate of about 300KB.

Well I am also on ADSL+2 and my peak speed from the exchange 2 kms
away is 10 Mbits.
You may be confusing what you see when you download from a web site
somewhere with what your speed is between you and the exchange.
No site I can connect to will get data to me faster than 10 Mbits.
Many sites are very busy, or have slow computers and a slow service to
the internet and to make matters even worse they may be overseas
somewhere.
By the time you trundle though all those servers along the
way all those points add their little delays into what you see.

There are a number of speed checking sites around, but where are
they ? They might be several network switches away from you.
Try downloading something from your ISP's server.
Try different things as they might have several servers running.

A lot of people will be disappointed with the NBN because they will
not get the 100Mbit or 12 Mbit speeds we plebs expect.
They don't let on that will be the speed to the NBN's server.
The speed to your ISP may be something else.

Foyle;
I should have asked for you not to confuse bit rate with data speed.
You are probably getting about 10 Mbit per second rate but data does
not arrive at that sort of speed because delays occur in flow all along
thae way. So it arrives in bursts of 10 Mbit packets of data with a
varying delay between packets.

Hope all that helps as I had to make the assumption you are an
average internet user. If not it might help someone else.
Appologies if it was an incorrect assumption.

This is looking like another promise that Juliar will have to back flip on.

"This is looking like another promise that Juliar will have to back flip on"

Certainly so, but perhaps we should wait for the next natural disaster in order to allow her to save face. I have no interest in shaming anyone, only in getting that dreadful NBN off our backs.