Too little, too late, for the local loop?
The news this week that Canberra-based TransACT was going to start rolling out fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) services it announced in May, was at first intriguing.
Full Duplex
A view from the trenches of Australian telecommunications. As the name implies, it’s a two-way conversation and we ask you not to pull any punches ... we won’t.
David Braue
A bulletin board troll in the 1980s, David Braue has been online long enough to remember using the text-based Lynx browser to visit www.ibm.com, one of around 100 Web sites available back then. Telecoms has remained an obsession as he developed ever more complicated schemes to stay in touch with family overseas without going broke. After more than a decade covering Australia's ICT industry - and watching our telcos stumble time and again - he's eager to call them to task.
Latest Posts
Telstra's newest product ... groundhogs
Bill Murray's weeks spent in the purgatory of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania -- depicted in the amusing movie Groundhog Day -- have become a cultural sounding point, mentioned in passing to describe a situation where someone is stuck in the same painful, unresolvable situation day after day.
Is cable the answer to our broadband woes?
Somewhere along the line, it became assumed that xDSL technologies -- which run over the last-mile of wiring so tightly controlled by Telstra -- were the only way forward for Australian broadband.
For Boyle's sake, an indecent proposal for ISPs
It's been 345 years since physicist Robert Boyle published the experimental results confirming what is now known as Boyle's Law, which to paraphrase is: a gas will spread out to fill any available space.
One asterisk can ruin your whole day
When broadband providers offer packages that you think look to good to be true, you're rarely disappointed.
Broadband shame: Sneakernet strikes back
There are times when the tone of Australia's broadband discussions makes me want to laugh, and others when it just makes me want to cry. The past week has been one of the latter, after two very different broadband-related stories made their way across my desk.
Could USO changes be poisoning the well?
There must be something in the water in Canberra. After years of measured inaction, the Coalition is taking long-overdue steps towards universal broadband and working around Telstra's continued domination -- after 10 years of deregulation -- of the country's telecommunications wholesale markets.
Fibre isn't for everyone
Just a few days after the Australia Connected program was launched Communications Minister Helen Coonan was selling the initiative to the TV talk shows.Senator Coonan made a good defence of WiMax technology -- which, I should say right now, is great stuff and really shouldn't be lumped in with flaky and low-powered Wi-Fi.
Australia Connected ... a political football?
The government's Australia Connected program, it appears, is no longer an altruistic and long-overdue investment in Australia's infrastructure, but a political football whose primary purpose seems to be to send a massive "nyah-nyah" to the Labor party.Such is the price of progress in an election year.
iPhone changing the world, one backflip at a time
Steve Jobs' backflip on a key aspect of the iPhone stood out from a normal day -- broadband furore, antagonistic marketing, personal attacks and government inaction -- in the world of Australia's telecoms market.At this week's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) Jobs said the iPhone, that oh-so-cool gadget set to make its mark on the US later this month (and on Australia, whenever Apple gets around to it), would have the ability to run third-party applications.