11 ms·

Yes, but you are clearly cherrypicking data. 1Gb of internet in Australia ($0.68) is fantastic value compared to 1Gb of internet in Canada ($12.55). Australia'

Yes, but you are clearly cherrypicking data. 1Gb of internet in Australia ($0.68) is fantastic value compared to 1Gb of internet in Canada ($12.55). Australia's mobile data network is competitive on quality, and is amongst the fastest in the world.

fbelzile 6y ago
In Canada, we're mostly limited to Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw, along with some other provincial crown corporations. Our geography might cause a slight increase in costs, but other than that, limited choice in the market and high barrier to entry keeps our fees high I think.
- paranoidrobot 6y ago
  In Australia we have three physical mobile network operators on a national basis: Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. All the other brands you see are MVNOs running on mostly Optus and Vodafone, with the occasional one here or there on Telstra.
  - angott 6y ago
    MVNOs are unable to operate in Canada because the carriers mentioned above won’t let new entrants use their networks. It’s how they protect their oligopoly.
  - hug 6y ago
    There are significantly more MVNOs on Telstra than there are on Vodafone -- I think you'd be surprised how many more. I would hazard this is because there's a giant legislated fence down the middle of Telstra (referred to as "structural separation") that literally demands that Telstra's retail and wholesale divisions not talk to one another. On a tangent related to that, though, I am very confused about exactly how Australia ended up with such a robust, competitive market when it comes to Internet services. Importantly, Net Neutrality has never ever ever been a thing in Australia: Zero-rating content has been a thing since the 90s: when my friends had a blisteringly-fast-for-the-times 10mbps cable internet package (with, from memory, a 50GB shaped cap), you wouldn't bother downloading something until it hit the BigPond Games site, where the downloads didn't count towards your cap. Even now net neutrality is not a thing: All of the physical network operators bundle in unrated Netflix or Spotify or, y'know, whatever. They compete on offering the best value-adds, as opposed to competing on crippling the service the least. I'm thankful for it, but also it strikes me as particularly odd, in the current times where I expect literally every company to be essentially defrauding little old ladies to turn a buck. Do any fellow Australians have any idea what the real reason for this is? Is it to do with the early legislation demanding Telstra's wholesale & retail structural separation? The mandatory (again, legislated) wholesale of ADSL by Telstra? Why does Optus (read: Singtel) play ball? Is it because of the aforementioned issues? I have so many questions.
    - nl 6y ago
      I think one of the main reasons it strong oversight of the sector by both the ACCC and Telecommunications watchdog. It took a long time to force this, but aggressive competition by regional ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) forced Telstra to allow access to their ADSL network, and once that was in these and other companies used similar tactics to force open other markets. Optus aggressively used MVNOs to build market share in mobile markets, and while Telstra still charges a premium the generally decent quality Optus network has kept a cap on how much additional they can charge.
      - ImaCake 6y ago
        I would suspect genuine regulated competition is the correct answer here (as you spell out). This is in contrast to the monopolies and corruption seen elsewhere. The customer service is still horrible, and NBN remains a disaster.
        nl 6y ago
        Customer service is an interesting one. The independent ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) had excellent reputations for customer service until they were all taken over by TPG. Nowadays Aussie Broadband has a pretty good reputation and interestingly has basically followed the same model: not always the absolute cheapest, but competes on benchmarks like speed, and with an engineering-heavy management team.
    - JimmyAustin 6y ago
      I cant answer your questions on net neutrality, but I do have fond memories as a teenager of waiting 24 hours after a WoW patch came out to grab it from unmetered from GameArena to save my parent's 13gb download cap.
    - megablast 6y ago
      Optus has the most. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_mobile_virtual_network_operators https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_mobile_vi...
    - 6y ago
- walrus01 6y ago
  When Shaw purchased Freedom, I was optimistic that they would put a serious amount of money into building a sufficient number of rooftop, monopole and tower LTE last mile access sites to be serious competition to Bell, Telus and Rogers. Sadly this has not been the case. The network coverage even in the major metro areas of Vancouver and Toronto is very poor compared to the others. I think Shaw sees much better ROI from their last-mile captive DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable customers. Many of whom are on places where the local telco is years away from doing a real GPON FTTH overbuild. So it's 150Mbps+ DOCSIS3 service options vs 10-15Mbps ADSL2+ on long loop length copper.
zhte415 6y ago
I do not regard the parent as cherry picking data at all. I travel a lot, internet experience varies wildly especially in locations where restrictions are in place. For example typing this on a phone in a coffee shop in China, VPNd as for some non-reason HackerNews is blocked. MBps has with it a lot of nuance, and then infra.
- NeutronStar 6y ago
  Maybe if you compared the EU to NA, and ME with other ME, and SEA with other SEA you would have less cherry picking going on. Apples to apples.
  - zhte415 6y ago
    The internet in MY is pretty different from VN, or even a skip across the border to SG. Not easy to pick a spot on the globe and assume everything in the vicinity is the same. Even ISPs in the US.
    - NeutronStar 6y ago
      Sure, but it should be more comparable than Canada and Pakistan.
- fareesh 6y ago
  1GB in India is pretty cheap+good. A small amount of stupid censorship but otherwise pretty solid. I lived in Canada for about ten years. It's a ridiculously expensive place in terms of food and internet costs. At the time I was pleased because the best connections we had in India were 1Mbps. When I moved back I was happy to see we had way better internet, digital payments and banking services.
Flimm 6y ago
Nitpick: 1Gb is only an eighth of 1GB and I think you meant the latter.
- paublyrne 6y ago
  I knew the difference between a gigabit and a gigabyte but didn't know there were official symbol units for them. According to Wikipedia a gigabit is indeed Gb and a gigabyte is GB. Having the only difference be case was always bound to cause confusion. :/
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    Yes, I hate that, not only since sometimes people accidentally get it wrong like just now, but what if it's in all lowercase? What is 32gb? Oh it's multiple of 8 so it might be bits.... Imagine how great this world would be if we just settled on gbit for bits and any variation of GB for bytes.
    - NeutronStar 6y ago
      Storage is usually in bytes while speeds are usually in bits.
    - lokedhs 6y ago
      32 gb is a bit weird. But when people write mb, it should be read as "millibit", which is terribly small.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
> Australia's mobile data network is competitive on quality, and is amongst the fastest in the world. Really? That hasn’t been my experience — and granted I’ve never lived in Australia or spent much time out of Sydney but I was there for 10 days in February and even though I paid for 4G Plus or whatever Optus calls LTE, speeds weren’t even comparable to what I can get in the US and were truly behind what I got in Seoul (where I was right after I was in Sydney). The only research I’ve seen that indicates Australia is amongst the fastest comes from research that is based on maximum speeds, not average speeds. I can appreciate that Australia has robust cellular networks (assuming the user doesn’t live somewhere where they are forced to use satellite), in part because home internet speeds are so poor, but I wouldn’t put it in even the top 10 of parts of the world I’ve visited for internet speeds.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  YMMV depending on where you are and what network, but Australia was the first place I managed to do 100 Mbps speediest on LTE (this was a few years ago, now I can get 200 Mbps where I live). I spent my time in the more rural parts of the country and was on Telstra though.
- to1y 6y ago
  Not sure where the data comes from but in my experience mobile data is very expensive in Australia
- icanhackit 6y ago
  > whatever Optus calls LTE Optus is terrible. It's worth paying a slight premium for Telstra 4G. I'm on a 45gb cell phone plan for AUD$60 and it works everywhere, even in tunnels or remote areas, with speeds that shame my Fibre To The Building connection (though not in latency). My work laptop uses Optus and regularly loses connection despite being in an inner city suburb and close to a cell tower.
weego 6y ago
They are clearly limiting their commentary to personal experience, something I can't believe you're trying to spin into being controversial.
Closi 6y ago
I would say in England £20 gets you roughly 20gb of good quality internet, but there are lots of plans that will sell you way more for way less with poor coverage and throttling. The post implies that they found a rate which was $2 for 20gb in the U.K. in their cheapest tarrif - which I assume was some sort of ‘unlimited capped at 200gb for £15’ style deal which would be heavily throtttled.

fbelzile 6y ago

In Canada, we're mostly limited to Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw, along with some other provincial crown corporations. Our geography might cause a slight increase in costs, but other than that, limited choice in the market and high barrier to entry keeps our fees high I think.

paranoidrobot 6y ago
In Australia we have three physical mobile network operators on a national basis: Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. All the other brands you see are MVNOs running on mostly Optus and Vodafone, with the occasional one here or there on Telstra.
- angott 6y ago
  MVNOs are unable to operate in Canada because the carriers mentioned above won’t let new entrants use their networks. It’s how they protect their oligopoly.
- hug 6y ago
  There are significantly more MVNOs on Telstra than there are on Vodafone -- I think you'd be surprised how many more. I would hazard this is because there's a giant legislated fence down the middle of Telstra (referred to as "structural separation") that literally demands that Telstra's retail and wholesale divisions not talk to one another. On a tangent related to that, though, I am very confused about exactly how Australia ended up with such a robust, competitive market when it comes to Internet services. Importantly, Net Neutrality has never ever ever been a thing in Australia: Zero-rating content has been a thing since the 90s: when my friends had a blisteringly-fast-for-the-times 10mbps cable internet package (with, from memory, a 50GB shaped cap), you wouldn't bother downloading something until it hit the BigPond Games site, where the downloads didn't count towards your cap. Even now net neutrality is not a thing: All of the physical network operators bundle in unrated Netflix or Spotify or, y'know, whatever. They compete on offering the best value-adds, as opposed to competing on crippling the service the least. I'm thankful for it, but also it strikes me as particularly odd, in the current times where I expect literally every company to be essentially defrauding little old ladies to turn a buck. Do any fellow Australians have any idea what the real reason for this is? Is it to do with the early legislation demanding Telstra's wholesale & retail structural separation? The mandatory (again, legislated) wholesale of ADSL by Telstra? Why does Optus (read: Singtel) play ball? Is it because of the aforementioned issues? I have so many questions.
  - nl 6y ago
    I think one of the main reasons it strong oversight of the sector by both the ACCC and Telecommunications watchdog. It took a long time to force this, but aggressive competition by regional ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) forced Telstra to allow access to their ADSL network, and once that was in these and other companies used similar tactics to force open other markets. Optus aggressively used MVNOs to build market share in mobile markets, and while Telstra still charges a premium the generally decent quality Optus network has kept a cap on how much additional they can charge.
    - ImaCake 6y ago
      I would suspect genuine regulated competition is the correct answer here (as you spell out). This is in contrast to the monopolies and corruption seen elsewhere. The customer service is still horrible, and NBN remains a disaster.
      - nl 6y ago
        Customer service is an interesting one. The independent ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) had excellent reputations for customer service until they were all taken over by TPG. Nowadays Aussie Broadband has a pretty good reputation and interestingly has basically followed the same model: not always the absolute cheapest, but competes on benchmarks like speed, and with an engineering-heavy management team.
  - JimmyAustin 6y ago
    I cant answer your questions on net neutrality, but I do have fond memories as a teenager of waiting 24 hours after a WoW patch came out to grab it from unmetered from GameArena to save my parent's 13gb download cap.
  - megablast 6y ago
    Optus has the most. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_mobile_virtual_network_operators https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_mobile_vi...
  - 6y ago
walrus01 6y ago
When Shaw purchased Freedom, I was optimistic that they would put a serious amount of money into building a sufficient number of rooftop, monopole and tower LTE last mile access sites to be serious competition to Bell, Telus and Rogers. Sadly this has not been the case. The network coverage even in the major metro areas of Vancouver and Toronto is very poor compared to the others. I think Shaw sees much better ROI from their last-mile captive DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable customers. Many of whom are on places where the local telco is years away from doing a real GPON FTTH overbuild. So it's 150Mbps+ DOCSIS3 service options vs 10-15Mbps ADSL2+ on long loop length copper.

zhte415 6y ago

I do not regard the parent as cherry picking data at all. I travel a lot, internet experience varies wildly especially in locations where restrictions are in place. For example typing this on a phone in a coffee shop in China, VPNd as for some non-reason HackerNews is blocked. MBps has with it a lot of nuance, and then infra.

NeutronStar 6y ago
Maybe if you compared the EU to NA, and ME with other ME, and SEA with other SEA you would have less cherry picking going on. Apples to apples.
- zhte415 6y ago
  The internet in MY is pretty different from VN, or even a skip across the border to SG. Not easy to pick a spot on the globe and assume everything in the vicinity is the same. Even ISPs in the US.
  - NeutronStar 6y ago
    Sure, but it should be more comparable than Canada and Pakistan.
fareesh 6y ago
1GB in India is pretty cheap+good. A small amount of stupid censorship but otherwise pretty solid. I lived in Canada for about ten years. It's a ridiculously expensive place in terms of food and internet costs. At the time I was pleased because the best connections we had in India were 1Mbps. When I moved back I was happy to see we had way better internet, digital payments and banking services.

Flimm 6y ago

Nitpick: 1Gb is only an eighth of 1GB and I think you meant the latter.

paublyrne 6y ago
I knew the difference between a gigabit and a gigabyte but didn't know there were official symbol units for them. According to Wikipedia a gigabit is indeed Gb and a gigabyte is GB. Having the only difference be case was always bound to cause confusion. :/
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Yes, I hate that, not only since sometimes people accidentally get it wrong like just now, but what if it's in all lowercase? What is 32gb? Oh it's multiple of 8 so it might be bits.... Imagine how great this world would be if we just settled on gbit for bits and any variation of GB for bytes.
  - NeutronStar 6y ago
    Storage is usually in bytes while speeds are usually in bits.
  - lokedhs 6y ago
    32 gb is a bit weird. But when people write mb, it should be read as "millibit", which is terribly small.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

> Australia's mobile data network is competitive on quality, and is amongst the fastest in the world. Really? That hasn’t been my experience — and granted I’ve never lived in Australia or spent much time out of Sydney but I was there for 10 days in February and even though I paid for 4G Plus or whatever Optus calls LTE, speeds weren’t even comparable to what I can get in the US and were truly behind what I got in Seoul (where I was right after I was in Sydney). The only research I’ve seen that indicates Australia is amongst the fastest comes from research that is based on maximum speeds, not average speeds. I can appreciate that Australia has robust cellular networks (assuming the user doesn’t live somewhere where they are forced to use satellite), in part because home internet speeds are so poor, but I wouldn’t put it in even the top 10 of parts of the world I’ve visited for internet speeds.

kalleboo 6y ago
YMMV depending on where you are and what network, but Australia was the first place I managed to do 100 Mbps speediest on LTE (this was a few years ago, now I can get 200 Mbps where I live). I spent my time in the more rural parts of the country and was on Telstra though.
to1y 6y ago
Not sure where the data comes from but in my experience mobile data is very expensive in Australia
icanhackit 6y ago
> whatever Optus calls LTE Optus is terrible. It's worth paying a slight premium for Telstra 4G. I'm on a 45gb cell phone plan for AUD$60 and it works everywhere, even in tunnels or remote areas, with speeds that shame my Fibre To The Building connection (though not in latency). My work laptop uses Optus and regularly loses connection despite being in an inner city suburb and close to a cell tower.

weego 6y ago

They are clearly limiting their commentary to personal experience, something I can't believe you're trying to spin into being controversial.

Closi 6y ago

I would say in England £20 gets you roughly 20gb of good quality internet, but there are lots of plans that will sell you way more for way less with poor coverage and throttling. The post implies that they found a rate which was $2 for 20gb in the U.K. in their cheapest tarrif - which I assume was some sort of ‘unlimited capped at 200gb for £15’ style deal which would be heavily throtttled.