In a very limited trial this week, Samsung said it was able to get 1Gbps speeds on a 5G wireless network with 28GHz (yes, GHz) over a distance of 2 kilometres. The technology giant has said that it wants to be able to get 10Gbps speeds on its network for the public by 2020.

The argument between the Coalition and Labor has largely shifted away from the old fixed versus wireless debate, with the Coalition agreeing that fixed networks will play a role in Australia's broadband future — but just what kind of network it should be is the sticking point. It was, however, not entirely unsurprising that a few people, including conservative commentator Andrew Bolt, would question whether Samsung's 5G trial is the end of the line for the NBN.

The difficulty in claiming the newest lab trial is that the technology itself is still in very early days, and would be very expensive on its own. Samsung's trial needed 64 antennas in order to achieve 1Gbps.

It also used the 28GHz spectrum band, which is a much higher frequency than what telcos are used to using for getting in buildings.

The price for the technology will come down over time, but it is difficult to see that the price for the spectrum would. Certainly, the technology might evolve over time and use less spectrum, but for now, that is more than the telcos in Australia can afford by a long way.

Even if they were able to afford all of that spectrum, the costs would be recouped through high data prices for mobile users. The telcos even warned about this when the government set the reserve price for 4G spectrum late last year.

And that's without even taking into account other factors that show fixed line will still ultimately be able to achieve higher speeds than wireless. While 1Gbps is all well and good in a lab test, what result will be achievable in a network full of users?

Given wireless' capacity constraints, a new network with larger spectrum demand is not going to fix the daily commuter hell that many of us face each day. Short of some miraculous leap in technology that we haven't seen yet, 5G would suffer the same congestion issues that every previous network iteration has suffered from.

Updated: This article originally stated that the spectrum used 28GHz of spectrum rather than using the 28GHz spectrum band.

A total of 30MHz of the 700MHz spectrum band was left over after the digital dividend auction, where Telstra picked up 2x 20MHz and Optus picked up 2x 10MHz in that band. Only four companies participated in the auction process: Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, and TPG, and Vodafone had already indicated that it was not going to buy any of the 700MHz spectrum.

Together, Telstra and Optus could have bought out the entire 700MHz spectrum band, because each company would have been allowed to buy a maximum of 2x 25MHz. However, the capacity that the companies have obtained today will no doubt be more than sufficient for 4G services for the next few years, given their spectrum holdings in other bands and how much 2.5GHz spectrum they also picked up at the auction.

TPG was a surprise entrant in the auction, but given that it isn't in the business of building mobile networks just yet, it chose to spend much less than the other two carriers, and therefore only invested in the 2.5GHz band, where the spectrum was significantly cheaper.

In a press release today, Turnbull said the auction was "another Labor bungle", because the expected AU$3 billion from the auction only reached just under AU$2 billion due to the leftover 700MHz spectrum. He said that the reserve price was "extremely costly by global standard", something that Optus had agreed with before begrudgingly picking up some of the spectrum.

The government has previously stated that the price was only determined after Vodafone indicated that it wouldn't participate in the 700MHz auction, meaning the government was seeking to get as much out of the other two telcos as possible, and hoping that in lifting the cap, Telstra and potentially Optus would buy much more spectrum than they ultimately did.

There wasn't any hint at that stage that another company would jump into the fray.

At the time of announcing the reserve price, the Australian government was pushing to deliver a surplus in this financial year, and the revenue from the auction was a key part of that push.

Now that the government has given up hopes of delivering a surplus in the next financial year, the pressure is off to get in the revenues as quickly as possible, and the government showed this by pushing back the payment for the spectrum until the second half of 2014. Leaving spectrum unsold will hurt the budget bottom line in the short term, but ultimately it is still an asset that can be sold.

Keep in mind that the 700MHz spectrum will not be made available to Optus and Telstra until the beginning of 2015, and Telstra has already indicated that there will need to be a few more networks jumping on to use the APT700 band (the 700MHz stack for the Asia-Pacific region) before there will be compatible devices.

This means that we still have several years before the spectrum is even useful, by which time millions of people will be using 4G devices in Australia. When the government of the day — whichever one it happens to be — then tries to sell off that spectrum, it's not too difficult to see that the spectrum would be snapped up very quickly by Optus or Telstra, which may find that demand is already exceeding what they were expecting.

A potentially revived Vodafone may also ultimately find that while its existing holding of 20MHz in the 1800MHz spectrum band works well in metropolitan areas for long-term evolution (LTE), the company might struggle at delivering 4G to regional Australia, which needs a lower band spectrum for LTE to reach across long distances. Picking up 700MHz would also help Vodafone to get better in-building coverage for 4G.

Or there might be another surprise guest. TPG again? Or iiNet?

The Australian Christian Lobby group is arguably the most influential religious-based lobbying group in Australia. The organisation claims to represent Christian values, but does not disclose member numbers, and indeed, many Christians disavow the actions of the group, particularly after the organisation's leader, Jim Wallace, has said that being gay was more hazardous to a person's health than smoking. The group claims it is bipartisan, but frequently criticises the Greens, and has recently shifted support towards the Coalition after Labor changed its party platform to endorse same-sex marriage.

The group has recently been lobbying the Coalition to reaffirm that it will not change its party platform to allow a conscience vote on same-sex marriage, which could potentially lead to a change of the law that would follow in the footsteps of New Zealand and the United Kingdom in allowing same-sex marriages.

Given the organisation's divisive influence on politics, it is unsurprising that people would find a way to go and buy up a domain name related to the organisation for their own purposes. While the Australian Christian Lobby has the .org.au address, which redirects to acl.org.au, the organisation neglected to purchase the .org address, meaning it is now host to the Australian Cat Ladies.

Buying up related domain names is not all that unique or new. Most large companies buy up almost every conceivable domain name that could be related to their brand as defensive purchases just to prevent this sort of thing happening. One of the complaints from the Australian government around the move to generic top-level domain names was that for domains such as .suck and .fail, companies would need to buy out all their own domains to ensure that commonwealthbank.fail or telstra.suck isn't snapped up by angry customers.

One domain I would like to have seen taken away from the Australian Christian Lobby is the AustraliaVotes.org.au address. Apart from an ACL logo in the top corner, it is not immediately obvious that the site is seeking to push the lobby group's values rather than being a hub for information about the election. The content hasn't been updated since 2010, but as we near the 2013 election in September, I wouldn't be surprised if the lobby group sought to use this to push its agenda again. Especially if there ends up being a referendum on same-sex marriage.

That domain is much more misleading than a site about cat ladies.

As Robb explained at the time, Abbott was in Sydney making an announcement about "boat people". It wasn't a good look. The two MPs were also barely across the detail of their own policy. The AU$6 billion policy at the time included AU$2.75 billion for an open-access fibre backhaul network to be built with the private sector, AU$1 billion for a wireless network in outer metropolitan Australia, AU$1 billion for regional wireless networks, AU$750 million to fix exchanges so that more people could get access to ADSL2+, and funding for satellite services.

The Coalition policy would be to, ultimately, sell off the National Broadband Network (NBN) and let the private sector fix broadband in Australia.

"The private sector is quite capable of identifying where there is a demand for fibre to the home," Robb said at the time.

The announcement contained a few heated exchanges with journalists over the policy, and wasn't helped by Smith then having to directly go to a debate with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Greens communications spokesperson Scott Ludlam, where the policy looked incredibly weak against the NBN fibre-to-the-premises project already under way.

Abbott himself didn't assist things that night when he appeared on The 7:30 Report, where, while trying to sell the policy, he uttered the immortal words: "I'm no Bill Gates here, and I don't claim to be any kind of tech head in all of this."

The Coalition proposal was blasted by the industry, and the party was branded as luddites by many. When Independent MP Tony Windsor sided with Labor after the election, he said the tipping point for him was broadband policy. The party's post mortem of the 2010 election showed that broadband was an area where the Coalition had been very weak.

But close to three years later, with a new Shadow Communications Minister in Abbott's former leadership rival Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott was only too happy to stand — albeit awkwardly — next to "Mr Broadband" as he announced the Coalition's $29 billion NBN-alternative, which is in reality, just a hybrid of Labor's 2007 fibre-to-the-node policy and Labor's 2009 fibre-to-the-premises policy.

"We believe in a National Broadband Network and we will deliver a better National Broadband Network faster and more affordably than this government possibly can," Abbott boasted. And Tony the Tech Head was born.

"Under the Coalition, by 2016 ... there will be minimum download speeds of 25 megabits, and up to 100," he said. "By the end of our second term, should we get one, by 2019, the vast majority of households will get access to 50 megabits, or 10 times current speeds.

"We will be able to do this because we will build fibre to the node, and that eliminates two-thirds of the cost."

Gone is the talk of making it all private investment and getting government out of the business of broadband. NBN Co will remain off-budget, and the government will keep owning it for quite a while under both parties. At this point, it even seems like the Coalition will keep the NBN name. While there is a fair amount of disagreement between the two parties over the cost and going with fibre right to the premise, it is a submission to Labor that it was onto something about the need for all this superfast broadband business.

But their policy would deliver what they call adequate speeds of at least 25 megabits-per-second by 2016, and at least 50Mbps by 2019 over fibre to the node, rather than as much as 1 gigabit-per-second over fibre to the premise by 2021.

The — for lack of a better word — derp on social media when the Coalition announced its policy was not totally unsurprising. The memes came thick and fast. "It's #fraudband!" they cried. A picture of a floppy disk representing Coalition policy, and the old lines about the number of computers needed in the world and the amount of RAM required were some of the more common ones.

Fraudband, amusingly, was what Conroy labelled the Coalition's 2007 broadband policy while promoting his own fibre-to-the-node policy.

The debate over the last few days has largely been over what is an acceptable speed for internet in Australia. The Coalition now argues that the average person won't really need more than 25Mbps in 2016, so the more cost-effective plan makes sense. Labor argues that demand will grow over time, and doing fibre to the premises now at a higher cost will save having to go back to do it in 10 or 20 years time.

Compared to its 2010 policy, the Coalition's 2013 policy is very thorough and well-researched, albeit with questionable methodology that puts Labor's policy at up to AU$94 billion in costs. But no matter how much work Turnbull has put in on his policy, with its lengthy background document to go with it, the Coalition is still branded as being luddites, in large part because of just how badly the party stuffed it up at the last election.

But while Twitter seems to be maintaining the fraudband rage, I suspect that in the wider community, people are much less concerned. In reality, NBN Co's own projections show that the company expects a lot of people to be taking up the lower tiered plans on the NBN for the first few years of service. In FY2016, NBN Co has forecast that over 70 percent of users will be on plans at 25Mbps or less, while by 2028, slightly under 50 percent will be on plans at 50Mbps or less.

Of course, that could be very conservative. Early uptake rates show users are by and large opting for 100Mbps plans. Though, NBN Co has said that this is likely an early-adopter issue, and it expects the ratio to more align with the company's forecast as customers switch over from the copper network.

There are many things in the Coalition's current policy that, had it been the 2010 policy, could have easily swung many voters, or perhaps even enough of the independents over to their side to have secured government. Whether that will be the case in 2013 remains to be seen.

But Turnbull announcing the policy close to five months out from the election can only be a good thing. Voters now have two defined and distinct policies to choose from. When all the invective and hyperbole from both sides this week dies down, there will be plenty of time for rational discussion and debate about the best broadband for Australia.

This is a fight that both Conroy and Turnbull can't wait to have.

The documents were prepared for the Attorney-General's Department in March and April last year, before the government went public with its proposal to log telecommunications customer data for up to two years for police and other government agencies to access during the course of criminal investigations.

The police say they need the data retained because without it, they won't be able to do their jobs. They've even said that two years isn't long enough, despite DBCDE recommending in the released documents that the data shouldn't be kept for any longer than six months.

But one of the more interesting parts of the documents is, when asked on the potential benefits to the end users for data retention, the department indicated that it wasn't fair to compare the benefits of airport security to that of data retention.

"In the case of airport security screening, the passenger directly benefits from the screening through improved flight safety," the department said.

The two do have their similarities, though. While some measures in airport security do make sense for safety, so too do some telecommunications interception arrangements, such as collecting data after a warrant has been obtained. As like some of the more burdensome security measures at airports, such as liquid restrictions, body scanners, and TSA patdowns, are deemed "security theatre" in providing little benefit other than having the appearance of protecting against terrorists at the price of an increased intrusion of privacy, the case for data retention has also centred around sacrificing privacy for the sake of stopping terrorists.

Then-Attorney-General Nicola Roxon last year warned that, without data retention, we would be creating a "safe-haven" for criminals and terrorists.

"Many investigations require law enforcement to build a picture of criminal activity over a period of time. Without data retention, this capability will be lost," she said.

"The intention behind the proposed reform is to allow law-enforcement agencies to continue investigating crime in light of new technologies. The loss of this capability would be a major blow to our law-enforcement agencies and to Australia's national security."

Despite repeated requests, law enforcement agencies haven't been able to quantify what would happen were data retention not brought in outside of these Doomsday scenario examples. So, too, it is unclear exactly what terrorist attacks have been stopped by full body scanners.

At this point, it's not clear whether we'll even see the government move ahead with plans for data retention. The parliamentary committee looking into the telecommunications interception proposals has yet to report back or make recommendations to the government, and the next parliamentary sitting week isn't until the week of the budget in the middle of May.

Whether the government will then have time consider the recommendations of the report, and then move to pass legislation before the September 14 federal election, remains to be seen. It isn't expected that the legislation would pass in the current parliament, and any attempt to push it through would likely be defeated, similar to the government's messy attempts to pass media reforms earlier this month.

The figures do not paint the rollout in a good light, with just over 1,400 brownfields premises passed between the end of December 2012 and March 12 this year. It calls into question whether NBN Co would be able to ramp up from 47,511 to its target of 286,000 brownfields premises passed by the end of June.

Devoted NBN pulled down the figures on Monday afternoon. ZDNet has learned that this wasn't at the request of NBN Co itself, but from Nextgen Networks, which is Devoted NBN's wholesale provider.

NBN Co told ZDNet that "customers and their resellers all have a responsibility to treat confidential information accordingly".

But the release shows that NBN Co's claim to the Senate Estimates committee in questions on notice in February did not provide the whole picture. In response to a question on how many had signed up in Tasmania in the last 12 months, NBN Co said:

"Now that NBN Co has reached volume rollout, it is impractical for NBN Co to provide ad hoc updates on financial and deployment metrics to a level of granularity not already provided for in public releases, parliamentary reporting processes, and regular rollout information provided on our website for the use of access seekers."

The data provided to the retailers is fairly granular, and not something that is available to the public, in contrast to the company's assertions that it couldn't provide this sort of information now.

Many have questioned whether more frequent construction updates are required, but the fact that retailers are given more information about the status of the government's project than the general public is not a good look for a government-owned company that has defended its claims of being as transparent as possible with the public.

When NBN Co begins to hit peak rollout, and — as outlined in the corporate plan — is passing thousands of premises per day with fibre, the weekly or monthly updates will become less important. But while NBN Co continues to lag behind schedule, the company really ought to take ownership of the delays and be transparent as to the reasoning behind them.

The tweet in question came on Tuesday, after there were interjections from the public gallery during Question Time referring to Prime Minister Julia Gillard as "Juliar" and "moll".

Gibbons tweeted that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott "contracted out his nasty side" to the interjectors.

Looks like @tonyabbottmhr has contracted out his nasty side to interjector's in the public gallery. A new low even for the Libs!

— Steve Gibbons (@SteveGibbonsMP) March 12, 2013

Pyne said that the tweet was "extremely unpleasant and untrue", and asked for it to be withdrawn. Speaker Anna Burke said at the time that she would consider stopping MPs tweeting during Question Time.

"Obviously, during question time, I am not seeing what Twitter is saying. I am not on it for my own sanity, and I would highly recommend everybody else getting off it for that very reason. I will investigate the matter," she said.

On Wednesday, however, Burke ruled that such a ban would mean banning all electronic devices in the House.

"To prevent tweeting would necessitate a blanket restriction on all electronic and communication devices in the chamber. Although this may appeal to some members, I imagine it would be strongly resisted by others," she said.

"I do acknowledge that public communications emanating from the chamber are a recent phenomena, which could impact on deliberations. This is something the House has only just started to grasp."

Burke said that the comments made by MPs on social media, unlike comments made in the House, are not covered by parliamentary privilege, so they can be sued for those comments.

Burke's decision to allow Twitter access in Parliament comes just under a month after the New South Wales Attorney-General Greg Smith backed down from a proposal to ban the use of all electronic devices in New South Wales courts.

The government is still moving ahead with the legislation, but lawyers and journalists will be exempt from the restrictions, Smith said at the time.

It's an almost embracing of the inevitable. Tweeting from court first rose to prominence in Australia during the start of the court battle between iiNet and the Australia Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). It has become much more commonplace since then with Optus TV Now, and Apple v. Samsung. The recent Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) hearings with former Labor power broker Eddie Obeid have also been fairly widely tweeted.

In parliament, it's not just a matter of tweeting. Although several MPs from all sides of politics tweet in parliament, many MPs use laptops and iPads to replace printouts of the speeches they read. Not to mention all the press gallery journalists who live-tweet Question Time every time it is on.

Banning all electronic devices because of one or two out of order tweets would not only have been a backwards move, it would have been unworkable. Sanity has prevailed.

There is one problem with the New South Wales government's proposal, however. Where it falls over is that the exemption is only for "recognised journalists". The last few times I've been in court reporting on Apple and Samsung, and tweeting to my heart's content, I've not really been wearing the stereotypical "PRESS" hat to make my profession known. Sure, I have business cards that list my profession as a journalist, but "recognised journalist" is quite open to interpretation.

The legislation, as it stands, could potentially see a number of people who are doing a form of journalism, whether it is considered to be professional or not, prevented from using electronic devices in New South Wales courts simply because they don't meet the guidelines of working for a publication.

We can only hope that when the law comes into force, it is treated as a guide, rather than the strict rule for who can and cannot tweet.

Yesterday, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry released its annual report showing a rise in global music sales for 2012 by 0.3 percent — the first time there had been a rise in sales since 1999. In Australia, sales were up 4 percent to almost AU$400 million on the back of digital sales growth.

The breakout report about Australia (PDF) noted that Australian music fans had "patiently watched and waited" for streaming music services such as Spotify and Rdio to arrive, and 2012 was a "watershed moment" for the services in Australia.

And yet, despite all the good news for the music industry, the report warns of potential doom and gloom with the arrival of the Australian government's AU$37.4 billion NBN.

"If more action isn't taken by the government and ISPs [internet service providers] to curb piracy levels, the NBN could have disastrous results for the local industry,".

The CEO of the Australian Recording Industry Association, Dan Rosen is quoted as saying that unless there is a "regime in place to protect copyright online", the NBN rollout "will be a catalyst for increased online piracy across the country."

The difficulty is that the reality doesn't really match their posturing. A market research report by NPD group released this week, showed that in the last year, there was a 17 percent decline in the use of peer-to-peer services to download music, with many turning to the legal streaming services.

The report suggested that 40 percent of people who had downloaded music in 2011 stopped or used less in 2012 as a direct result of access to streaming services.

Of course, there is the argument that streaming services do not generate enough revenue for artists to be a legitimate alternative income source, but the shift away from copyright infringement is itself important to note.

So if 2012 was really a "watershed moment" for streaming music in Australia, then surely more premises with access to a more stable dedicated fibre connection will help push streaming music to become even more popular in Australia, right?

The real reason the NBN is being blamed is because it is one of the more popular policies the Labor government has worked to bring in since it won government in 2007.

We're not going to see a completed review of the Copyright Act from the Australian Law Reform Commission before the election, and so it's not surprising that the copyright lobby would target the NBN in an attempt to coerce the Labor government to bring into place an infringement notice scheme that they've been asking for since the iiNet case, just like in the US or New Zealand, as soon as possible.

Any such scheme still has yet to be trialled, although we know Telstra and Optus are on board, and any attempt to get it done in the next six months before the election would be a public relations disaster for the government.

This is the greater threat to the government and users alike, much more so than vague prophesies of the potential doom of the music industry at some point in the future, simply on the basis of there being fibre connected to more homes in Australia.

The group's own report acknowledges that Australians are waiting for access to content distribution services for much longer than other countries. Perhaps — as iiNet has argued since winning its High Court case — addressing that issue now might go a long way to bring copyright infringement down faster in Australia?

Late last year, I travelled to Perth and did a few speed tests on both Telstra's and Optus' 4G long term evolution (LTE) networks. Telstra out performed on 4G by far, where in Melbourne and Sydney, Optus was clearly ahead. There were two reasons for this: Telstra has more 1800MHz spectrum holdings in Perth than just about anywhere else, and there's fewer 4G users there than in the centre of Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane.

So it's really no great surprise that Telstra chose Perth to do this test, but to Telstra's credit, the company's executive director of networks, Mike Wright, pointed out all the conditions that would be needed (including the 20MHz of spectrum) in order to achieve those sorts of speeds.

The company's second biggest mobile rival Vodafone yesterday revealed that in tests of its yet to be launched 4G network in Sydney's eastern suburbs, it was about to get speeds of up to 67Mbps with 10 MHz of spectrum. That is, of course, without anyone else on the network, so is not a true reflection of what speeds people will end up seeing once Vodafone launches its network.

But as Vodafone pointed out, the company has 20MHz of 1800MHz spectrum in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia, where as Optus has 15MHz, and Telstra has between 10MHz and 20MHz.

This means that, in theory, Vodafone could potentially see much greater speeds on its 4G network across the country once it's up and running. And even more so if Vodafone brings out a few CAT4 devices to go with it.

Of course, there will be a number of factors that could impact the performance, including the ongoing issue for Vodafone in getting sufficient fibre backhaul on its network to ensure that it can deliver those fast speeds.

We won't know until we get our hands on the 4G devices to test them out, but there's a good chance that starting from scratch with no 4G customers, competing against Telstra's existing 4G network with 1.5 million 4G customers and less spectrum in the 1800MHz band, we will see Vodafone outperforming Telstra, and most likely Optus, too.

And so it's no great surprise that Telstra announced this morning that it would look to start trialling the next stage of LTE, called LTE-Advanced, which offers greater speeds and the ability to combine spectrum bands, such as the 1800MHz and the 900MHz bands.

But any potential speed win for Vodafone might end up being short-lived. When Telstra buys up 700MHz in the digital dividend auction in April, if it wins the full allowance of 25MHz in the 700MHz band, along with what Telstra picks up in the 2.5GHz band, Telstra will have a fair bit of spectrum around the country to use for 4G.

The difficulty for Vodafone will be building back the trust in the company after two years of a reputation for having a less-than-stellar network, as it continues to shed customers by the truckload. The 3G overhaul has been completed, and the so-called "3G Plus" upgrades are well on their way to completion, but perhaps what might get people to reconsider the troubled company is a brand new super-fast 4G network with prices that will no doubt win back some of those disgruntled customers.

What do you think? Is 4G Vodafone's saviour?

Gillard chose to announce the date just under eight months out from the polling day in an unusual move, which she said was to starve off election date speculation and to provide certainty for business in Australia in the lead up to the election.

The announcement puts a fair bit of pressure on a number of tasks that the Labor government must achieve before September.

NBN

The National Broadband Network (NBN) will continue chugging along until election day, and the company — as was the case in 2010 — won't down tools during the election period. If the roll-out keeps going as planned, NBN Co will reach 341,000 premises with fibre (in both new and existing housing) by June, and assuming the NBN Co works every working day up until September 14 at the FY2014 average run rate, the fibre network will be available to 553,520 premises across Australia.

The fixed-wireless and satellite networks will be available to around about 331,250 premises, meaning that the network will be available to approximately 884,770 premises in total, provided NBN Co meets its targets.

As for how many people will be using services on the network by the end of June, NBN Co has set itself the target of 92,000 premises, according to the corporate plan. And if it is connecting as many premises as it expects, the company will have, at most, 95,625 additional customers using the NBN, bringing the total active services to 187,625.

The number is ultimately likely to be lower than this, however, mainly because the rate for the 2014 financial year will be largely affected by the switch off of the copper network, which is scheduled towards the end of the financial year. While the ramp up to the switch off date will likely see more in those first areas switch over, it is unlikely that NBN Co will hit the peak of new daily connections until towards the end of the financial year.

It's not clear at this stage what will happen with NBN Co should the Coalition win the election. The Real Solutions policy document released by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott over the weekend has exactly four dot points devoted to broadband policy, and it starts with a cost-benefit analysis being conducted on the network. Whether that means construction is halted, we don't know yet. The party has promised several times that it will flesh out its policies before the election, but hasn't done so yet, so we'll have to wait and see.

Data retention, IT pricing, and copyright reform

The committee charged with investigating potential reforms to national telecommunications and security legislation — that includes the controversial proposal to force telcos to retain customer data for up to two years — missed it's deadline to report back to parliament at the end of 2012. Between now and election day, the House of Representatives only sits for 37 days, while the Senate sits for 28 days.

This doesn't leave a lot of time for the committee to report back, for the government to draft legislation, enter it into parliament, and have it pass both Houses. The government was able to quickly pass legislation around deterring asylum seekers last year, but this legislation would likely face stronger opposition from the Coalition, and the government is unlikely to want to bring about any controversial legislation in the few months it has before the election. Internet filter, anyone?

The timing will also make it quite unlikely for anything to come from the parliamentary inquiry into why Australians pay more for IT locally than customers in other countries. That committee still has several hearings ahead of it, and probably won't report back to parliament for another few months. While IT pricing is an important issue, it's unlikely to be seen as one that needs legislation passed quickly through parliament.

The Australian Law Reform Commission's review into the Copyright Act, which largely focuses on how it should be adapted to allow for new technology and cloud computing, is not due to report until the end of November this year, putting it well past the next election before any potential changes are even considered.

Any major IT initiatives from the government are likely to pop up in the Budget in May. The government has already said that this will spell out the kinds of promises and policies that Labor will take to the election, and the Coalition will likely also begin releasing its policies after Budget.

Following glossy recalls of the things that Gen Y grew up with and contrasting it to the world today, like a troll being a friend or lunch not being a picture, Microsoft is attempting to rejuvenate the IE name, which it clearly sees as being something deeply unpopular with the generation who are in the early stages of adulthood. The line at the end of the commercial--"You grew up; so did we"-along with a shiny new Tumblr at browseryoulovedtohate.com, tells you all the reasons why IE is better. It's faster, it's designed for touchscreens, there's an entire new user interface--Microsoft's reasons go on and on.

Despite the perceived image problem, Internet Explorer's marketshare still sits over 54 percent, and its next closest rival, Firefox, sits at just under 20 percent.

There were predictions that IE's marketshare would slip below 50 percent, but despite a low of just over 51 percent in December 2011, IE's marketshare has been largely stable for the last year.

So why go after Gen Y at all?

It really comes down to the perception of Internet Explorer. A lot of people in this age group, particularly the tech savvy among us, grew up knowing how god-awful IE was, and have since stuck to alternate browsers. Down the track, when the workforce becomes more Gen Y and less Baby Boomer, there's every chance that IE's marketshare could slip under 50 percent, and just keep going. Getting in early to address the image problem could go a long way.

But for now, the immediate battle is going to be between Firefox and Chrome, who are locked in battle at around 20 percent marketshare. I personally still use both on a daily basis, though my current preference is Chrome. I have, however, been somewhat convinced to not give Firefox away entirely, thanks to ZDNet's Australian Editor Chris Duckett's recent comparison, which showed that Firefox is beginning to perform a bit better than it used to.

As mobile data use continues to skyrocket, and mobile networks become more critical than ever, people are paying more attention to the sort of coverage they're getting from their mobile providers. The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) frequently cites coverage problems as being one of the most-complained-about issues with telecommunications companies in Australia.

Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone all have extensive coverage maps on their website that tell you exactly where you can get 2G, 3G, and in some cases 4G.

But how do we know they're accurate?

If you want to find out if a restaurant is good, you check out reviews on a site like Yelp. If you want a broad overview of whether a mobile operator has good coverage, prices, or customer service, you might check out a website like Whirlpool. But getting data about the coverage where you work or live is a bit more complicated.

Getting an app that lets users collect their own data about mobile network coverage was inevitable, and there are a few around now. OpenSignal, for example, has coverage maps across the globe thanks to its Android app, and from the looks of it has extensive data covering a good portion of Australia. It ranks the telcos based on the performance the users have observed through the app.

The telcos I spoke to don't really believe much of the data to be accurate. For example, the ping for all telcos in Sydney sits at an average well over 300ms, which they believe to be far too high.

While the idea of crowd sourcing your telco coverage seems like a good one, there are many factors that people will have to take into account when determining their mobile coverage. What device the person is using and what spectrum bands it supports, whether they're inside or outside, the time of day they performed the test, and the number of users in a cell can all impact on the results.

Spaced out over a long period of time, too, I would wager that the results would skew quite a bit. Telstra Next G, for example, would have probably fared a lot better about 18 months ago, before it started adding millions of customers onto the network.

OpenSignal's community manager Samuel Johnston told me last week that he believes the number of users in Australia who have installed the app obviates the effect of any one sort of device skewing the results.

OpenSignal claims to have around 21,000 users across Australia, and has picked up millions of data points across the country. Johnston said he believes the data is more accurate than that provided by the telcos.

"Traditional carrier maps are based on projections, while ours are based on real-world readings. Our data is therefore more accurate than the maps that the carriers themselves use," he said.

Overall, 21,000 users is a drop in the ocean when Australia is ramping up to have 30 million mobile services. Australia doesn't even rank in the top 10 countries using the app right now, but with the release of an iPhone app soon, and potentially more users joining up, it'll be interesting to see how it fares in the long run.

What do you think? Is this the best way to find out what company has the best mobile coverage?

Vodafone has announced to customers this week that it will be changing its prepaid plans from mid February to remove the unlimited access to Facebook, YouTube, and a number of other social-media websites, and will also begin charging in per-megabyte blocks.

A brief glance at the prepaid offerings for Telstra and Optus show that both of these companies already charge in per-megabyte blocks for a number of plans — except for Optus, which charges in per-kilobyte blocks for data that comes from within Australia, and per megabyte everywhere else.

Vodafone said that it made the change to simplify plans, and is more in line with how its customers are using data.

That all makes sense. What is interesting, though, is that there would be many apps that don't use more than a few hundred kilobytes per session, such as the fairly ubiquitous social-messaging services like iMessage or WhatsApp.

These apps have been a concern of telcos worldwide for a while, although it is a bigger problem in the US than it is in Australia, because most standard prepaid and post-paid phone plans in Australia have unlimited texts built in.

There's no doubt that WhatsApp, BBM, iMessage, and any other number of data-based messaging apps are putting a dent into the number of text messages being sent, though. Research firm Ovum estimated that in 2011, telcos worldwide lost US$13.9 million in revenue due to social messaging.

However, the shift to per megabyte doesn't highlight a desire for the Australian telcos to shift their customers back from data to SMS, as it might be in other countries; it is more a push to try to get every last cent out of data possible, as more and more customers shift from using the traditional voice and text services to almost exclusively using data.

It's easy to tell that they don't begrudge the so-called "over-the-top" applications; they just want to monetise them. Telstra CEO David Thodey even admitted that he himself uses WhatsApp in a shareholder investor day last year.

Unfortunately, for now, it seems that the only way the telecommunications companies see that this can be achieved is by making Australians pay slightly more (or use slightly more) for their data than they do today.

The Finance Department's monthly statement, released yesterday, showed that cash receipts so far for the government to the end of October totalled AU$111.6 billion, which is AU$3.9 billion down on what the government had expected — meaning that the razor-thin AU$1.1 billion budget surplus that the government had been hoping to reach is now looking extremely unlikely.

The federal government has had the 2013 budget surplus as its target since the 2010 election, as it was one of the commitments that Labor took to the election. Since then, budgets have been slashed, and spending and new projects have been delayed, all with an eye on the incredibly elusive surplus.

Last week, when the government announced that the reserve pricing for the 700MHz "digital dividend" spectrum that the telcos will use for 4G networks will be AU$1.36 per megahertz per population, putting the lowest price at close to AU$3 billion, it was widely reported that this was to help the government get back into surplus.

Now that the surplus is off the table, why isn't this price being revised? Optus is teetering on the edge of pulling out of the April 2013 auction because of the price, and Vodafone pulled out months ago. Wouldn't it make more sense for the government to cut its losses and revise the price somewhere lower?

And, perhaps more importantly, if the government knew that the surplus target had vanished last week, then why announce the spectrum pricing before the government let the rest of us in on the secret?

I expect the government will say that it is all about securing value for the taxpayer for this precious resource. And that is fair enough. But given that only one of the three mobile operators in this country seems dead set on picking up on that spectrum, it's probably time to rethink the price.

Swan said yesterday that the government would not be "loosening the purse strings" and spending more now that it's not getting its surplus, but you've got to think that there would be some wiggle room on the spectrum price.

One of the major factors that is likely to be keeping Vodafone out of the auction, for example, is the fact that the government wants payment upfront for the spectrum. The telcos will have to pay for the spectrum at the time of auction in April 2013, but won't get access to that spectrum until much later, when the last analog television signal has been switched off and the government has restacked the spectrum band.

But with the government now not as desperate for the cash in this financial year, it would make more sense to delay the payments until the telcos actually get hold of that spectrum and are then in a position to be getting revenues from 4G customers who can fund those spectrum purchases.

A failure to rethink the pricing on the spectrum could see us in the situation where the only company bidding for 700MHz spectrum also happens to be the company that is being paid AU$11 billion from the government to switch off its fixed network.

Google Fiber began switching on services in Kansas City last month, offering up to 1 gigabit-per-second upload and download speeds to residents for, at most, US$120 per month.

While many other cities in the US may be looking on in envy and hoping to get Google Fiber rolling out to their town, the report from Goldman Sachs that a full rollout would cost US$140 billion is likely to burst their bubble. Although Google is reported to have US$45 billion in cash, it seems very unlikely that Google is going to do a nationwide rollout any time soon.

Goldman Sachs analyst Jason Armstrong projected that, if Google devoted 4.5 percent of its annual capital expenditure to Google Fiber, it would cover 830,000 homes per year. This means it that would likely take over a century to get the fibre laid across the entire country.

As Forbes contributor Tim Worstall noted, US$140 billion may seem like a lot for a company to take on, but if there is somewhere between 100 million and 200 million households in the US, it works out to be around US$1000 per premise. Worstall noted that the US government spends much more than US$140 billion annually on defence, with the 2012 budget standing at US$1.03 trillion. But with the deadline to the fiscal cliff edging closer, it's pretty unlikely that US President Barack Obama is about to embark on a US national broadband network anytime soon.

By comparison, Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) — funded by government equity and paid off over several decades — is rolling out to 12.2 million premises by 2021. While 11.2 million will be covered by the fibre-to-the-premise component of the network, the remaining 1 million will be serviced by fixed-wireless or satellite services. Capital expenditure for the network will be AU$37.4 billion, and operating expenditure will be AU$26.4 billion.

Given that NBN Co does not break the cost to roll-out fibre down to a per-premise cost — it is secret under the much-relied-upon "commercial-in-confidence" arrangement — it is difficult to tell how the difference stacks up to the cost for Google Fiber. A simple division of the capital expenditure for the NBN puts the cost at over AU$3,000 per premise, but that ignores the variations in the types of technology and other factors, so it is not a particularly useful measurement.

While it might appear more expensive on the surface, NBN Co will ultimately be rolling out the network much faster, and at the peak of the rollout, the company estimates that it will be passing 6,000 premises per day.

In July, I had noted, perhaps somewhat controversially, that Google Fiber was offering faster services to consumers in the US at a lower cost than the sort of retail plans we are seeing in the NBN marketplace today. In order to raise the capital to fund a wider rollout of Google Fiber, it is not inconceivable that Google would change its product offering and potentially raise prices in order to get the cash to pay for it, without having to dip into its own savings. But will customers be willing to pay more to get the fibre?

Broadband policy will become a key debate for the 2013 Federal Election, with Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull promising a network rolled out faster, cheaper, and more affordable to consumers — though he is not, at this point, able to say how much cheaper, how much faster, or how much more affordable that will be. He has frequently cited international case studies on how fibre-to-the-node networks can be rolled out faster, and at around a quarter of the cost of a fibre-to-the-premise network. So it will be interesting to see where Google takes its own fibre network rollout next and how we can potentially apply it to the Australian experience.

In any case, if Google did embark on a major national broadband network rollout in the US, Turnbull would say that it showed that the free market can work in fixed broadband infrastructure and that the government has no place in rolling out fibre.

According to the 3AW report, Crawley lost his phone in Barcelona and had contacted Telstra via email after reporting the theft to police.

When he returned to Australia, he found that he had a bill of AU$27,853. He contacted Telstra, who said that the account would be reimbursed once Crawley signed a statutory declaration and the telco received the police report. But two weeks later, his credit card was charged for the full amount.

According to the report, the reason why the charge was so excessive was because Telstra didn't put the block on his SIM until 36 hours after he reported it stolen.

The story is perfect talkback fodder. Big bad evil telco, international theft, bad customer service. It has everything that will stir up the kind of outrage that only AM radio can do best. And very quickly, Telstra said that it was going to refund the bill. But not before a few other callers, like Mavis and Stephanie no doubt, chimed in with their own problems with Telstra.

But the story had me wondering: in only 36 hours, just how exactly could someone rack up a bill of AU$28,000?

According to Telstra's global roaming charges page, local calls are charged at AU$2.00 per minute, and calls to Australia are AU$5.12 per minute. So even if the person was on a voice call for the entire time between when the phone went missing and when it was blocked by Telstra, it still wouldn't add up to that amount.

Where Telstra does get expensive is in data. In Spain, Telstra charges 1.5 cents per kilobyte, or $15.36 per megabyte. This means that, even if the full bill was only due to data, all the owner would need to download is around 1.8GB of data in order to reach the full AU$27,853.

A high-quality movie could easily get to that level of usage within 36 hours.

It serves as a good reminder that global roaming is still such a huge problem for the telcos to come to grips with. In a time when people are much more transient than they once were, we shouldn't continue to face such high costs just to be able to keep in contact while abroad.

There are multiple alternative methods to use a phone cheaply overseas, either through getting another SIM or using Skype, etc, but in many cases, people just want to keep in contact on their existing number.

When the governments of Australia and New Zealand looked to make trans-Tasman roaming a little cheaper, they encountered heavy resistance from the telcos in both countries, who suggested that the alternatives were good enough, and competition itself was reducing global roaming costs.

Australia and New Zealand roaming is one thing; we're neighbours. It's like the US and Canada. The rest of the world is a whole different kettle of fish.

Crawley's story this week proves that we still have a long way to go. Telstra told me that many telcos around the world are currently in negotiations to extend global roaming agreements from 3G networks to 4G networks. Perhaps part of that discussion should focus on how to stop sending customers broke just for logging onto YouTube?

The proposals came in a discussion paper released by Coalition MP Paul Fletcher today, which looks at better methods of protecting children online.

The so-called children's e-safety commissioner would be in charge of "education campaigns," and would give guidelines on how to deal with online content and behaviour that is directed at children but "fails to meet the criminal threshold."

The Coalition has recognised, in the discussion paper, that comments on Facebook or social media that may not be illegal could nevertheless be a form of bullying for children, and could lead to psychological harm. And while within Australia, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has the power to issue take-down notices for content that is refused classification (RC) or above R18+, content on international sites, such as the major social-media companies, is not in the ACMA's remit.

The Coalition suggests that to get around this, there should be a "co-operative regulatory scheme" for social-media companies that operate in Australia. In cases where people are being bullied on Facebook, those who are being bullied have a method to request that the content be removed.

With some degree of foresight, the Coalition has pointed out that this would be a voluntary, industry-funded scheme, and would not be implemented without consulting the industry first.

This is where it all seems to unravel. If the Daily Telegraph's recent "stop the trolls" campaign, which the federal government jumped onboard with, taught us anything, it is that a lot of the social-media providers already have policies in place to deal with these sorts of things.

In fact, although the Telegraph was calling a victory by saying that Twitter would be working with Australian law-enforcement agencies, Twitter in fact said that it wouldn't be doing anything much different to what it already was.

I can't see a future Coalition government getting any more out of these big US-based social-media companies than what the current government already has.

According to the discussion paper, the Coalition would also like to see "branding or symbols" placed on smartphones that have parental control tools, so that parents know which ones to buy. It's a nice idea, and I know that Telstra is working to bring in parental control tools with Smart Controls. A lot of smartphones out in the market already come with parental controls as it is. The problem is that parents will buy this device and think all of their problems are solved. The same argument as the recently dumped filter applies here; no matter what controls you put in place to stop people from doing something, they are going to find a way around it.

The decent part of the policy is about education. More education for both parents and kids around how to effectively deal with online bullying, dangers, or trolls and appropriate use of smartphones is likely to be much more effective than trying to force the social networks to play nice.

Of course, that didn't end up going so well. Slipper resigned as speaker after the leak of some rather distasteful text messages about female genitalia to former aide James Ashby; the government lost its extra vote and has since made another compromise to bring in watered-down pokies reform.

But it is fairly indicative of the life of this parliament. A razor-thin majority relying on the votes of several Independent MPs and a Greens MP in the Lower House in order to pass legislation means that the government, led by Prime Minister Julia Gillard, is always on the look to cut deals and make ways around policy that they had previously pledged to implement.

This is the main reason why the government's controversial carbon tax is in place — they promised to not bring one in before the 2010 election, but had to compromise with the Greens in order to win power — and the reason why it was such a political problem for the government before its implementation.

It is in this parliament that the 2007 internet filtering policy was always destined to die, one way or the other. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced overnight that the plan to legislate for the mandatory internet filter he had fought so long for would no longer go ahead.

Essentially, it had been dead on arrival since the 2010 election. The Greens were already opposed to the policy, while the Coalition came out before the election and stated that they would also oppose the policy. Labor simply did not have the votes in this parliament to pass the legislation.

Conroy announced in mid-2010 that he would shelve plans to bring about legislation for the filter until sometime in 2013, while a review of what content would fit under the definition of "refused classification" took place to determine what would be blocked under that filter. The review recommended a much narrower definition, and after eight months of discussions with industry, Conroy used this as his get-out-of-jail-free card to dump the plan entirely.

This morning, Conroy declared on ABC Radio that the original policy in 2007 was not the one the government had even intended to use in 2010, despite comments that he made at the time committing to implementing it.

"You're talking about the 2007 policy. In 2010, I called for a review of the category of refused classification because there had been genuine community concern. That review consulted the public, conducted by the Law Reform Commission, came back with recommendations earlier this year, and we are accepting them."

Conroy's alternative plan to compel those internet service providers who hadn't already agreed to block sites on Interpol's "worst-of-the-worst" list through existing legislation, avoids the need to fight for the controversial policy in a parliament where it would not have passed, and during an election year where the government is fighting for its survival.

On the one hand, the government has always had a good portion of the tech community on its side for the National Broadband Network (NBN) project, but on the other, the internet filter was always a cause for controversy. The #nocleanfeed campaign is still going strong after all these years. Although not everyone will be happy with the forced implementation of the Interpol filter, many will still see this as a victory for an open internet.

The polls are slowly starting to look a little less depressing for Labor, and putting controversial issues such as this to bed will no doubt be of some help in the lead up to the election, which is tipped at this point to be in mid-to-late 2013.

But despite this issue being somewhat resolved, there's still the looming issue of the government's data retention proposal, and by compelling ISPs to implement any sort of filter, there is always the prospect of a potential internet filter scope-creep.

The Coalition will likely capitalise on this perception. Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has come out today and said that, despite the "humiliating backdown," Conroy isn't a born-again internet libertarian.

"His instinct is always to control and dominate. This is the minister who boasted that he had the power to make telco executives wear red underpants on their heads. The internet filter has been abandoned only because Conroy has been forced to recognise he cannot get it through the parliament."

No doubt, the Coalition will play up this argument in the 2013 election, and also run aggressively on a platform of being able to deliver high-speed broadband faster and cheaper than Labor's NBN — although, we're still waiting for the detailed and costed Coalition broadband policy.

Unlike the US election, where President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney seldom ever debated technology issues, outside of the concern about the rise of China, Australia's federal election in 2013 looks destined to be all about tech. And with the internet filter issue somewhat put to bed, Labor will look to capitalise on the tech cred from the NBN.

In the discussion paper released in July, the data-retention proposal got two and a half lines of a 61-page document outlining a range of reforms to telecommunications-interception legislation:

Applying tailored data-retention periods for up to two years for parts of a dataset, with specific timeframes taking into account agency priorities and privacy and cost impacts.

But despite the glossing over it got in the discussion paper, it has been the main focus of committee hearings, YouTube videos, and online campaigns, with many concerned that the government is asking internet service providers (ISPs) to keep all of our data for two years, so that it can be accessed by law enforcement without a warrant.

The initial concern was that the "dataset" was not defined. Then the department said it was "metadata" or the information about communications — like the time of a call, the sender, the location from where the call was made — rather than the content itself. Late last month, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) then tabled a document (PDF) in Senate Estimates hearings, explaining that for ISPs, all that would be required was the retention of email addresses and an "internet identifier."

This caused further confusion, because an "internet identifier" could be interpreted as an IP address, which — for the destination IP address — is essentially the person's internet history. Department secretary Roger Wilkins has since said twice that URLs would not be retained under any such proposal, and that any data that could be linked to the content of a communication, such as an IP address, would not be part of the scheme.

On Friday, almost all of the MPs on the committee investigating the proposal took the department to task for not providing enough information about the proposal.

Both Brandis and Faulkner were direct with their concerns about the process.

"There has been concern that from the kick-off of this process, there has not been any flesh on the bones about the data-retention scheme proposal. A very controversial issue manages about two and a quarter lines in a dot point on page 13 [of the discussion paper]," Faulkner said.

"I find it almost incredible that the one issue that we have identified as being of concern to us has been left obscure in the document," Brandis chimed in.

Wilkie questioned how effective it would be, given that "evil doers" will find ways around it through encrypted services.

In fact, the only person who appeared sympathetic to the department and the data-retention proposal was former Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock. Ruddock said that he had lots of feedback from the community about acting on terrorist threats, but none about community concern over the data-retention proposal.

While none of the committee professes to be technical experts, it is clear that the data-retention issue is now front and centre in their minds as a concern to the public. It is something that has united Greens, Independents, and parts of the Liberal and Labor parties.

It is heartening to see the politicians assessing this issue thoroughly, and it is clear that the Attorney-General's Department and law enforcement are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with justifying their reasoning behind data-retention proposals.

I wouldn't be surprised if the report from the committee argues against implementing a broader data-retention scheme. Or, if it does, it will be very narrowly defined. The difficulty here is that a narrowly defined list of what they can and can't obtain about a person's communications records is hardly going to be technology-neutral, and law-enforcement agencies might end up finding themselves in the same situation five years down the track.

In any case, the government can just ignore the advice of the committee and go ahead with its own plans, if it so chooses. Ultimately, we have no way of knowing what will be included in the data that ISPs will be forced to retain until we see the legislation in full. So the "flesh on the bones" is still fairly stringy at this point.

Apple has not really acknowledged the problem so far, though it quietly fixed the problem for Verizon customers in the US at the end of September. But the issue is still affecting Australian iPhone users, with many turning to Apple's support page, the telco's own discussion forums, and broadband forum Whirlpool for answers.

One Whirlpool user said that using an iPhone 5, they had managed to use 5GB of data in a single week and had received a bill from Telstra for AU$1,300. One Vodafone customer said that they had used 20GB and was looking at a massive AU$6000 bill.

The official line from Telstra is that the company is aware of the issue and is looking into it, Optus said that it was still investigating the root cause of the issue, and Vodafone said it was aware of the issue and was monitoring it. It is easy enough to work around it if you just turn off the cellular data on your iPhone when connected to a Wi-Fi network. No doubt, we'll get a carrier settings update soon that fixes it, but for those who haven't kept an eagle eye on their data usage may be in for a shock when it comes to bill time.

And who exactly will be paying for that bill? The customer thought they were doing the right thing by offloading their data usage to the Wi-Fi network, and it's not the telco's fault; they were merely providing the customer with what they wanted. Add to that, the three major telcos already alert their customers when they're nearing their data limits. It's really Apple's fault, but I sincerely doubt Apple will be offering any sort of compensation to customers who have had a problem with this issue.

Telstra said it would inform customers about the problem where it needed to, and Optus said it'd work with customers on a case-by-case basis to address concerns about discrepancies between mobile data and Wi-Fi usage.

I wouldn't be surprised if the telcos ultimately took this one on the chin. Apple messed up, but it isn't going to be the one to end up dealing with a complaint to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) if the customer tries to get out of paying the bill. And in such a tight mobile market that exists in Australia right now, every mobile operator is focused on keeping their customer base.

A quick glance of Optus' community website suggests that it is already happening, with one user claiming that Optus has already waived the data charges received as a result of the bug.

Have you been using more mobile data than expected? Who should pay for the excess data usage?