Internet in Australia?
August 10, 2021 — October 4, 2024
1 Practical
Which ISPs are good?
I have just switched to Aussie Broadband, which I recommend. Here is my referrer link. So far it is going great. Their tech support is knowledgeable and helpful, and they have taken time to explain things to me at a level appropriate to my understanding. The smartphone app could be less clunky, but it’s ok.
Previously I was with TPG, who were marginally cheaper but not particularly reliable in that their dealing with our faults was slow and useless. Their call centre was unpleasant. Staff sound harried and stressed, and were not helpful. I spent 2 hours waiting to negotiate for a refund after they cut off our internet for a week, when our connection was allocated to a different customer without consultation or notice. They gave us $25 back. Their tech support never helped solving any of the problems we had with our internet, just read through a script that was typically unrelated to the nature the difficulty. We saved a small number of dollars per month with this bargain basement option, at the cost of a lot of stress and time. If you have the option, pay to avoid this quagmire.
Additionally, I suspect you should try to avoid working for this organisation. The workplace sounds high-stress.
2 History, policy
It is hard to find the articles about the slow evolution of Australian connectivity, and the modern National Broadband Network, because infrastructure is complicated and slow, and many people get congratulated and blamed in infrastructure projects.
- Paul Budde claims that NBN problems are a result of Coalition Government’s cost-cutting policies
- The NBN risks being a poster child for government mismanagement
- John Quigley, What happened to broadband in Australia?: NBN Co’s former CEO on how the Coalition broke the internet
The last one I think most interesting, in that it asserts the internet build-out became a political lever for the Murdoch press to push a party line:
Even today, speculation continues as to why the press was so opposed to Labor’s NBN. The former prime minister Kevin Rudd recently wrote that the Murdoch media, in attacking Labor’s NBN, was trying to protect its interests in the Foxtel pay-TV asset. During my four years as CEO of NBN Co, I never saw any evidence that it was worried about NBN’s impact on Foxtel. In fact, it could be argued – and this was a position that I put to Kim Williams when he was Foxtel’s CEO – that a good outcome for Foxtel would be to transition off the HFC cable, deliver their broadcast content via satellite, and use the NBN for streamed services.
So if protecting the Foxtel pay-TV asset wasn’t the motivation for the relentless attacks on Labor’s NBN, what was driving the constant negative coverage?
The answer became clear to me in a meeting set up by Williams after he became CEO of News Limited (now News Corp Australia), with nine or ten of his editorial staff in attendance.… News Limited’s position regarding the NBN seemed to be one of principle. Never mind that the private sector would never build an NBN, or that the current market structure was flawed, or that government had a successful history of fixed-line infrastructure building. The view from News Limited’s side of the table was that the government just shouldn’t be building this sort of public infrastructure.