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As an Australian, me too. Kinda. Except in the opposite direction: I've never had net neutrality, and I'm not sure I care. We've always had data-caps that woul

by hug 10y ago

As an Australian, me too. Kinda. Except in the opposite direction: I've never had net neutrality, and I'm not sure I care. We've always had data-caps that would sound insane to those of you in the Americas or Europe, and we've always dealt with them by not having net neutrality. As an example, I remember the first time coaxial cable Internet started becoming something that was really purchasable by a large number of residential users. The speed was 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up. The data limit for the month was 10GB. Extra data was available at the low low rate of 14c/MB (or $140/GB, for those who don't want to do the math). The provider, though, maintained a large private mirror of downloads that were "free" -- they didn't count towards your monthly cap. They mirrored things like patches for games, linux ISOs, and they had a fairly large shareware repository. I couldn't get cable Internet at home -- they never ran the cable down my street -- so I was stuck on 28k dial-up. I would have killed for cable, data restrictions or not. But that was back then. What about now? Now? We have companies that deliver data over LTE who do similar-but-different things. I have a cellular plan with Optus (AKA Singtel), which is $80 a month. For that, I get 20GB worth of downloads, but I also get absolutely unlimited streaming of Netflix, and unlimited streaming from most of the popular music services (Spotify, Google Play, I Heart Radio, Apple Music, and maybe others I can't remember). I stream tens of gigabytes of video and audio every month, and I can do this because of the lack of net neutrality here. Some other provides on pre-paid services which typically have tiny data caps will provide "unlimited social media access" -- because that's how they draw in teens, what I assume is the most valuable market segment for pre-paid. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that when a service becomes big enough that it's marketable to with free data, then one of the providers will pick up on it as a value-add. Something they can do that improves their service so they can grab more market share. Some of you are probably going to argue that this is a symptom of a broken market, and I'm not sure that's the case. Networking in Australia is hard. We have 1/10th the population of the US in a country about the same physical size. It's possible I'm really very wrong about how this all works. Maybe I'm naive and it's all really terrible and I should be upset. It's just hard to see from here how perfect net neutrality is an issue.

whytaka 10y ago
Are any "value-add services" Australian-borne?
- hug 10y ago
  Yes. Australian Football is free to stream on certain LTE carriers, along with Netflix on Optus I get access to the ABC (national government-owned broadcaster) and Stan (an Australian streaming service much like Netflix, owned by Fairfax). Home-broadband wise, here's a link to Telstra (Australia's largest telecomms company by a large margin) and their policies around free content on their residential "BigPond" ISP: https://www.telstra.com.au/support/category/broadband/manage/bigpond-unmetered-sites https://www.telstra.com.au/support/category/broadband/manage... And a link to services available for 'free' on Internode (now owned by TPG, which is I think at this point Australia's second largest ISP) http://www.internode.on.net/residential/entertainment/unmetered_content/ http://www.internode.on.net/residential/entertainment/unmete... TPG themselves do free Netflix, although I'm not sure what else is unmetered.
  - whytaka 10y ago
    Admittedly, I've only taken a cursory glance and so I may have missed something, but it seems to me that most of what's offered is either large corporations (Netflix, Xbox), or the Telecom network's own media arm. That's nightmarish to me. 6 corporations owning 90%+ of media outlets in the US is already bordering corporatist dystopia.
    - hug 10y ago
      Optus isn't unmetering Netflix because there's a shady backroom deal with Netflix to try to drive their viewership by sales of cellphones, Optus is unmetering Netflix because it's a tractable problem, they can QoS the traffic, and they can deliver a service that will hopefully attract more users. If you don't happen to watch much Netflix, but another carrier offers a deal on something you do use? Switch! Or maybe you don't need the value-add services and just want an overall cheaper plan? You can do that, too! Porting to a different ISP or cellular carrier is a legally enforced right here. 99% of the population of Australia is able to switch at will to a number of different providers, and there's nothing like the regional monopolies that companies like TWC or Comcast have in the US. There's huge, fundamental gaps in the way different continents provide Internet access. Maybe if there were no competition of ISPs at a local level in Australia, net neutrality would be a huge problem here. It isn't a problem here, though. I don't think it's something that the average Australian in the street has thought much about, and if you explained it to them they probably wouldn't understand what the big deal is. Despite the fact that we don't have net neutrality, the sky isn't falling, and Australian access to the Internet is basically as free-as-in-freedom as it is in the US. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and the idea that ISPs must only ever be dumb pipes is one way to solve the problem of competition in the Internet provider space, but it's certainly not the only one.
toast0 10y ago
Historically, bandwidth in and out of Australia was super expensive, because there weren't that many undersea cables connecting it to the world; that's why Australian providers would run mirrors with uncapped access, but everything else had high usage fees; I would guess one of the conditions of getting a service zero-rated is connecting to the carrier in Australia, so the carrier isn't footing the international data bill. Likely many of these providers have local caching and serving, and may update their storage when undersea cables are off peak to reduce their own data costs. (OTOH, the undersea capacity has increased a lot, so it may not be as expensive as it once was)
- hug 10y ago
  I used to joke that the reason that Australian data-caps were so low is that they have to get all of the data over by boat. The way I see things is that having an Internet service that is in high demand is simply incentive for ISPs to peer with you. Netflix reportedly said (link below) that it regretted offering 'unmetered data' to Australian ISPs, because they feared it would have a chilling effect on the availability of other streaming services. Their fears were unfounded: Stan & Presto are both available unmetered on certain ISPs. (Quickflix went out of business, but not because of ISP deals, but because they couldn't compete in library size and other major ways -- I suspect there's simply not room for three Australia-based streaming services to license enough content to keep themselves afloat.) http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/netflix-regrets-unmetered-data-deals-with-optus-iinet-20150416-1mm5ey.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/netflix...
  - shermanyo 10y ago
    Just a head's up: Presto was owned by FoxTel, and was shut down this month. Stan seems to be a good competitor, but that's only comparing it to the Australian Netflix library. I'm of the opinion that all competition has done is split the market, as they fight over the same set of exclusives. I'll often browse US Netflix rather than switch between Aus Netflix and Stan to find a movie I've seen previously. US Netflix seems to have 90% of the missing content Stan offers over Aus Netflix.

by hug 10y ago

whytaka 10y ago

Are any "value-add services" Australian-borne?

hug 10y ago
Yes. Australian Football is free to stream on certain LTE carriers, along with Netflix on Optus I get access to the ABC (national government-owned broadcaster) and Stan (an Australian streaming service much like Netflix, owned by Fairfax). Home-broadband wise, here's a link to Telstra (Australia's largest telecomms company by a large margin) and their policies around free content on their residential "BigPond" ISP: https://www.telstra.com.au/support/category/broadband/manage/bigpond-unmetered-sites https://www.telstra.com.au/support/category/broadband/manage... And a link to services available for 'free' on Internode (now owned by TPG, which is I think at this point Australia's second largest ISP) http://www.internode.on.net/residential/entertainment/unmetered_content/ http://www.internode.on.net/residential/entertainment/unmete... TPG themselves do free Netflix, although I'm not sure what else is unmetered.
- whytaka 10y ago
  Admittedly, I've only taken a cursory glance and so I may have missed something, but it seems to me that most of what's offered is either large corporations (Netflix, Xbox), or the Telecom network's own media arm. That's nightmarish to me. 6 corporations owning 90%+ of media outlets in the US is already bordering corporatist dystopia.
  - hug 10y ago
    Optus isn't unmetering Netflix because there's a shady backroom deal with Netflix to try to drive their viewership by sales of cellphones, Optus is unmetering Netflix because it's a tractable problem, they can QoS the traffic, and they can deliver a service that will hopefully attract more users. If you don't happen to watch much Netflix, but another carrier offers a deal on something you do use? Switch! Or maybe you don't need the value-add services and just want an overall cheaper plan? You can do that, too! Porting to a different ISP or cellular carrier is a legally enforced right here. 99% of the population of Australia is able to switch at will to a number of different providers, and there's nothing like the regional monopolies that companies like TWC or Comcast have in the US. There's huge, fundamental gaps in the way different continents provide Internet access. Maybe if there were no competition of ISPs at a local level in Australia, net neutrality would be a huge problem here. It isn't a problem here, though. I don't think it's something that the average Australian in the street has thought much about, and if you explained it to them they probably wouldn't understand what the big deal is. Despite the fact that we don't have net neutrality, the sky isn't falling, and Australian access to the Internet is basically as free-as-in-freedom as it is in the US. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and the idea that ISPs must only ever be dumb pipes is one way to solve the problem of competition in the Internet provider space, but it's certainly not the only one.

toast0 10y ago

Historically, bandwidth in and out of Australia was super expensive, because there weren't that many undersea cables connecting it to the world; that's why Australian providers would run mirrors with uncapped access, but everything else had high usage fees; I would guess one of the conditions of getting a service zero-rated is connecting to the carrier in Australia, so the carrier isn't footing the international data bill. Likely many of these providers have local caching and serving, and may update their storage when undersea cables are off peak to reduce their own data costs. (OTOH, the undersea capacity has increased a lot, so it may not be as expensive as it once was)

hug 10y ago
I used to joke that the reason that Australian data-caps were so low is that they have to get all of the data over by boat. The way I see things is that having an Internet service that is in high demand is simply incentive for ISPs to peer with you. Netflix reportedly said (link below) that it regretted offering 'unmetered data' to Australian ISPs, because they feared it would have a chilling effect on the availability of other streaming services. Their fears were unfounded: Stan & Presto are both available unmetered on certain ISPs. (Quickflix went out of business, but not because of ISP deals, but because they couldn't compete in library size and other major ways -- I suspect there's simply not room for three Australia-based streaming services to license enough content to keep themselves afloat.) http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/netflix-regrets-unmetered-data-deals-with-optus-iinet-20150416-1mm5ey.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/netflix...
- shermanyo 10y ago
  Just a head's up: Presto was owned by FoxTel, and was shut down this month. Stan seems to be a good competitor, but that's only comparing it to the Australian Netflix library. I'm of the opinion that all competition has done is split the market, as they fight over the same set of exclusives. I'll often browse US Netflix rather than switch between Aus Netflix and Stan to find a movie I've seen previously. US Netflix seems to have 90% of the missing content Stan offers over Aus Netflix.