The Relative Cost of Bandwidth Around the World
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blog.cloudflare.com
Telstra was a government monopoly in the past and owned + owns almost all the copper network in Australia. From 1997, Telstra was progressively privatized without separating the telecommunications business (phones) with the telecommunications infrastructure (cables). This was an idiotic idea.
There were some regulations that forced the infrastructure to be offered wholesale to competitors but they're still the gateway that the majority of the population get onto the internet. It's also problematic as Telstra are doing worse and worse at maintaining the copper network that is relied upon. If you are an ISP using their network, you need to go through their maintenance fees to improve the line quality for any of your customers. The cost of wholesaling through the Telstra network is also fairly high. Regardless, we've got reasonable competition at the ADSL/ADSL2+ level thanks to this.
Forward to the National Broadband Network (NBN), the government plan to connect the majority of Australian homes to fiber to the node (FTTP). Telstra submit the equivalent of a joke tender for the project -- 12 pages connecting only ~90% of the population when the tender requests 98% -- and then suffer their biggest one day stock fall in history when it's rejected.
Construction of the NBN rolls on without them, promising to replace the copper network with a fiber network that will be the new telecommunications infrastructure used by the majority of ISPs.
However... a new government came to power in Australia. One of their election falsehoods was that FTTP was too expensive and too slow and instead a ridiculous hodge podge (sorry: "hybrid") network of failing technologies would be preferred. Instead of building a complete FTTP network for $73 billion, they're instead going to spend $41 billion on a hybrid network that will need to be replaced only five years after completion according to the chairman of the NBN[1].
This hybrid network relies on the old copper network owned by Telstra. Telstra have previously stated that it is ready to die and will have billions of dollars of maintenance issues.
This is also only a very brief discussion of the ridiculousness.
tldr; Telstra played an important role in screwing up the previous generation of Australia's internet. Telstra is continuing to play an important role in screwing up the current generation.
[1]: http://www.zdnet.com/its-time-for-turnbull-to-swallow-his-nb...
Still would have been worth it at double the price to get rid of Telstra. I can't believe how much the politicians have ruined it.
How on earth can you take these people seriously when they can't recognise that data consumption trends have been rising continuously throughout the life of the internet. I mean HDTV is only 1080p, and we already have 4k monitors available to consumers today - which are more than 4 times the data. One single 4k video feed is already about double everything else they'd budgeted for in their "somewhat extreme" scenario. Zero forward thinking.
[1]"Such a thing as too much speed"... http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/...
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/leaked-documents-reveal-th...
Now guess which companies' ex-CFO was appointed by this new government to be the new CFO of NBN Co. Here's a hint: it was one of the above two. Fox in hen house much?
If nothing else he's already ticked the #1 qualification for this new job - maximising profits for Rupert Murdoch.
Oooh, I know the answer to that! It's the bunch of people who just announced that Telstra just hit a 12-year high in their share price two weeks after announcing a $4.3 billion profit over here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/latest/telstra-lift...
Disclaimer: I own Telstra shares through an ETF. Because at least this way I get some money back through dividends. And one may as well profit from their evil, sad as it is. It's not like this government is going to do anything to upset the Telstra/NewsCorp duopoly of hate and evil.
Yeah, we are gonna build our own fiber network, with hookers, blackjack, and monthly limits ....
The CVC price needs to come down a bit, but it's a pretty standard way of pricing.
This is a state provider, there are many private ones around, and their prices (usually for a 50-100 Mbit downlink via usual Ethernet cable) are $10-20 per month (comparable, that is), if I remember correctly.
The ADSL quality has always been good, btw (esp. given I wired the modem to telephone cables probably 30-40 years old :) ) -- decent pings, stable speed, was down only once or twice (in all the years).
Shortly, people used to 30 MBit downlinks might have forgotten how little most of our (modern-day) media requires -- often a megabit, or two per second :)
The only real downside is uploading speed. Which meant i dont to enjoy Google Drive or DropBox as much.
Hopefully when G.Fast arrive next year, those who are still relying on copper will get a very decent upgrade.
However this might change because of political instability (or "stability" if you call it that).
UPD: If they consider Europe to have population of 750 they surely include Russia and other ex-USSR in the mix.
http://monitor.nsw.ix.asn.au/cacti/graph.php?local_graph_id=...
If you can find some data though, I'd encourage you to add the data to the table :)
For a company with offices worldwide, we have by far the most expensive and have the worst performing connection to our regional datacenter.
The standard response from any supplier is to blame Telstra.
Recently I was porting some ISDN phone lines from an old provider to a new SIP provider. Not only did the two need to arrange and agree the porting with each other, but Telstra needed to work on both of their behalf to facilitate the port. One number took 3 months.
All of my companies are bootstrapped (and bandwidth is the largest expense item), so some of the rates quoted got me excited.
It sounds like there are a lot of knowledgeable folks here (on the buy side), would you mind sharing some info?
I typically buy between 2..5 Gbps per POP in the US and Europe.
What's the best rate I should be able to get, you think? Tend to buy L3 or premium blend (no Cogent or HE). Any insights would be appreciated.
You can get 100/50 with 80GB of traffic for NZ$110/month, which is US$91.64. You can go full unlimited at USD$115. Amazingly, this is the same price as Comcast Extreme 105 which is only 105/20.
One thing to understand about the NZ market. Since carriers charge per byte, I was generally able to get full speed out of my links during prime time - barring TCP RTT throttling.
I always imagined that the opposite would be true.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-...
Is this just because they're offering blended traffic?
"We don't disclose exactly what we pay for transit, but I can give you a relative sense of regional differences. To start, let's assume as a benchmark in North America you'd pay a blended average across all the transit providers of $10/Mbps (megabit per second per month). In reality, we pay less than that, but it can serve as a benchmark, and keep the numbers round as we compare regions."
(It's also likely CloudFlare buys more transit than most individual sites, so CF pricing wouldn't be meaningful for smaller circuits.)
Transit also varies by factors other than price. Cogent publishes prices, so for Cogent transit, it's pretty much a known quantity.
> "We don't disclose exactly what we pay for transit, but I can give you a relative sense of regional differences."
They are literally pulling 10 out of the air and saying "IF it cost 10 in the US, what would it cost in other regions comparatively"
Side note: the situation is very different when talking about last mile ISPs in North America.
While a desire to avoid pointing out any positive of a situation that drives them crazy frequently may be part of the reason it isn't mentioned I think it pales in comparison to just forgetting about whatever isn't a problem.
>If Australians wonder why Internet and many other services are more expensive in their country than anywhere else in the world they need only look to Telstra (Note: ~50% of all internet is from Telstra in Australia).
>What's interesting is that Telstra maintains their high pricing even if only delivering traffic inside the country.
>Given that Australia is one large land mass with relatively concentrated population centers, it's difficult to justify the pricing based on anything other than Telstra's market power.
>In regions like North America where there is increasing consolidation of networks, Australia's experience with Telstra provides a cautionary tale.
The root problem is duopoly (in the case of grocery stores) or monopoly (Telstra).
It took me a long time to put my thumb on what Australia is like and it wasn't until I watched the show "Fringe" and saw the alternate universe (with the Airships and the Twin Towers) that it finally struck me, it's like an alternate universe America. Everything is just like the U.S., except for some weird little details. Big cars, lots of open land, cowboy analogs (drovers), purpose built capital designed by a foreigner, densely packed East Coast, East Coast vs. West Coast rivalry. And then suddenly it's not: driving on the left, everything is overpriced, egg yolks are a different color, etc.
I remember seeing real estate listing for some really remote housing in some dying gold town somewhere. Like 2 bedroom bungalows with no property. And they're priced at what you'd expect to find in a nearby suburb of Sydney (except the housing in the suburbs around Sydney is ludicrously expensive). While anywhere else in the world people would basically be paying you to take the title so they could get the hell out of there.
The local markets in Australia are just weird.
note I live in one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S. so I'm used to seeing high prices. But even single bedroom apartments in Sydney suburbs rent out at prices you can get entire houses for in similar geographic regions around my area. You'd think the exact opposite would be true. In almost any other part of the world with plentiful land and low population, you end up with cheap housing, while in Australia that doesn't seem to be true at all.
> I remember seeing real estate listing for some really remote housing in some dying gold town somewhere.
Without further details, I can't say whether your assessment of "dying" is correct or not, but it is true that towns that have mining operations experience explosive growth (and contractions) in housing prices. Local governments in general don't want to allow a lot more house building, because in 5, 10 or 20 years time when the mine closes down, having all those empty houses causes a ghost town effect where the town really will die (the towns almost always existed before the mines, and they want them to exist after the mine leaves too). That means people pay north of $1 million dollars for a fibro shack. Mining companies will hire the local showgrounds long term, so that they can build a tent city for their workers (who use the showground toilet and shower facilities etc). Local house prices will fluctuate by hundreds of thousands of dollars in days, based upon financial news from the mining companies about whether they are liking to build/expand/close the local mining operation.
Yes, it's weird.
As for Sydney specifically, it is actually very space constrained. With the ocean on one side, and the Blue Mountains on the other side, there actually isn't a lot of room for expansion.
You are correct that in general there is a lot of undeveloped coast line though (inland is basically inhospitable). It's just not where the jobs are.
I honestly don't know. I was with a couple of locals and remember seeing the advertisement and remarking at how expensive the housing was. This was 7+ years ago but I remember they said something about it being a dead mining town turned into a prospector town. Folks looking to hit it big finding an unknown vein somewhere.
I've worked with more Aussies and we've had lots of discussions about the particularly weird housing market there, with of course lots of segues into the weird Bay Area housing market by way of comparison.
Melbourne has vast swathes of open land in all directions, and housing prices are nearly the same.
I asked the question to a friend, and he replied that I just don't get it: the people who already have houses aren't interested in reducing the value of them. Almost all federal politicians have multiple properties. Why would they legislate to do that? So we have negative gearing that will never get solved, lots of foreign purchasing driving up prices, and no-one willing to pull the pin out of the electoral grenade and start dealing with our housing bubble.
As long as you are happy to drive everywhere and can find a suburban job or are prepared to make long commutes there is plenty of relatively cheap housing to be had.
That's unlikely (the dying gold town bit). I suspect what you saw was a house in an iron ore town. There's never enough housing in those towns, and the miners are very well paid.
Australia is more expense then the USA when it comes to everything. Rent, grocery, internet, etc. Australian consumers also have on average less buying power then American citizens. [1]
The medium household income for both countries is nearly identical. $30,932 (USA) vs $30,077 (AUS) ~2.76% [2]
So income is ~3% higher in America, but rent is ~46% more expensive in Australia (Groceries are 32.5%). I would say its based on factors other then average income.
[1] Numbeo.com
The median household income in the US is over $53,000 - not $30,932. I think it's much higher in Australia as well (for example they list nominal median at $47k on the wiki).
http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr12-02.pdf
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
Even the chart graphic at the bottom right of that wikipedia entry shows $50k+ as the proper median income level:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/US_real_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalisation
You're right that the U.S. median household income is north of $50K.
So then it is expensive relative to your income, is it not?
Others have noted that on average, the answer is no, but without calculating the stats, I would expect the lower wage earners to be better off in Australia (especially when costs for healthcare and other services are near zero).
A few years ago, Australians were the wealthiest people in the World (they slipped to number 2 last year). This is private assets, nothing to do with income, government income and expenditure etc. What does this show? Not much really, just pointing out that statistics is hard, and if you don't like what something shows, then change the metric until you find the news you want. In other words, take everything that people are saying (including me) with a grain of salt.
Australia has the massive disadvantages of: 1. being miles away from everything, 2. having small population with high Internet-demands and 3. having very, very little "local" content.
This means a large majority of Australia's Internet needs must be serviced by extremely expensive not-at-scale trans-Pacific services.
Places like Germany, Japan, Korea don't have these same issues. They have tons of "local" content and when they need to hop to the USA it's using infrastructure that is massively at scale (i.e. serving a continent like Europe or Asia, as opposed to Australia).
Not to say the Australian circumstances aren't an example of a massive regulatory cluster, but it's not quite as simple as it sounds.
It's true, I fully accept your point, but the wording made me ask myself where "everything" is located. 20 years ago I might have assumed it was unambiguously located somewhere in the U.S., but I think as time passes and the Internet grows and changes shape, Europe and other countries have begun to play a more important part.
This is an example where a traffic-based network diagram could be used to locate the Internet's "center of mass", so to speak, a region or location that could be described as the middle of everything.
In the Nordic region in particular the huge dissimilarity between Scandinavian languages and Finnish is driving it imo. If the cultural bloc were only Norway/Denmark/Sweden, I think it would settle on a kind of "Scandinavian" (their written forms are mutually intelligible). But that would exclude Finns from the Nordic family, so the working language has to be English, whether it's in formal institutions like the Nordic Council, or informal ones like http://www.reddit.com/r/Nordiccountries. I think this is only going to accelerate, and Americans will gradually become a smaller proportion of English-language online posters than they used to be, as the younger generation of Europeans who are comfortable in English become more present in anglophone contexts. But it'll be a while before there's a real critical mass.
Hence, Australia relies on content from the English speaking world which is dominated on the Internet by the U.S., this translates to trans-pacific cabling to the U.S. West Cost which is pretty pricey.
But, but, the market is magic! Regulation is evil. Does not compute!?!!
I heartily apologize to all who were disconcerted by my caricature of the useful idiots who "believe in a free market in telecommunications", as the most recent email I received from my corrupt Senator put it.