chris caines

Sometimes its refreshing to get an international perspective on events in Australia & Ars Technica today has a great article on the National Broadband strategy which had me understanding it for the first time, especially in a global context. Its worth a look if you are interested in such matters just to read the links to government policy and all the relevant discussion papers. Not something you’d get from an Australian media outlet, our local paper refuses to link at all from its stories. The submission from Google is interesting if only for the tidbit that GoogleMaps was invented in Australia. This is for all intents and purposes our national updated take on the idea of Universal Service. From the google paper:

According to the OECD, broadband consumers pay more for less than their
counterparts in many countries around the world. Australia ranks 23rd out of 30
countries in price per Mb/second, and the average speeds advertised by Japanese
Internet providers are nearly 8 times those advertised in Australia.8 Australians also
face bandwidth caps (average of 14.75 GB) not present in many other countries, and
face the highest costs for additional megabytes of data ($.011).9 Some of these cost
differences may stem from unique characteristics of the Australian market, most
notably Australia’s geographically diverse population and physical separation from
other markets (although it should be noted that some studies have shown that
population density does not fully explain broadband penetration across countries10).

…Google understands that the Government is strongly considering adopting a structural or functional/operational regime separation of some sort to ensure open access on the NBN.11 Google believes that this is critical from the perspectives of promoting open access to the NBN, plentiful and robust competition as well as preserving the Internet’s openness.

Google submits that a fundamental goal of the NBN regulatory regime must be to separate the ownership of the NBN infrastructure from the provision of services over the new network. Structural separation commonly means that the owner of the network assets divests from other vertical markets, whereas functional separation requires varying levels of separation between functions, employees, and information within a company.