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I made a similar rant: http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-available-but-sparse-expensive-restricted/ http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/w

by laut 17y ago

I made a similar rant: http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-available-but-sparse-expensive-restricted/ http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-availa... I was in Sydney but went to the Philippines earlier than planned because I couldn't get internet access in Sydney without paying crazy amounts of money for internet by the hour (or 15 minutes etc.)! And as a "westerner" being in the aussie/kiwi timezones, sometimes you might want to be online when the cafés that have internet are closed. NZ was similar. In Australia they had a TV commercial advertising how much 2GB traffic a month was. Surreal. Traffic seemed in very short supply. I've been used to unlimited traffic (only limited by speed) via DSL for maybe a decade. In my experience in Asia, South America and Scandinavia internet via wifi is available many places in hotels and/or cafés, bars etc. without having to pay extra. In Tokyo you want to use ethernet because wifi would limit the bandwidth :-)

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
It's really impressed on me the degree that the U.S. is interconnected. For instance, when ordering a pizza, I went online looking for shops. Wrong answer. Shops were found in the yellow pages. Only in Sydney did I see online ordering available, and it was from an American Company (Pizza Hut) In New Zealand in some places if you want internet you pay for it in 15-minute/5MB increments! Holy restricted-internet, Batman. Because of that, the things we take for granted back in the states are a major pain here. For instance, we're using FlipCams on our vacation, creating movies to upload. But forget about uploading movies over 100MB unless you want to pay lots of money. We have Carbonite to backup our hard drives while we do other things -- but that can be heavily bandwidth intensive as well. On Saturday nights I like to use video chatrooms, but forget about that too. Without knowing it, we're easily consuming hundreds of MB (and perhaps more) back in the states. I have satellite at home and regularly complain about the restrictions on it. It just goes to show that until everybody gets fiber to the NIC, we're still going to be sucking wind as far as the possibilities for applications go. Disclaimer: I only have a very limited experience, so I might be way off-base in my analysis.

by laut 17y ago

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

It's really impressed on me the degree that the U.S. is interconnected. For instance, when ordering a pizza, I went online looking for shops. Wrong answer. Shops were found in the yellow pages. Only in Sydney did I see online ordering available, and it was from an American Company (Pizza Hut) In New Zealand in some places if you want internet you pay for it in 15-minute/5MB increments! Holy restricted-internet, Batman. Because of that, the things we take for granted back in the states are a major pain here. For instance, we're using FlipCams on our vacation, creating movies to upload. But forget about uploading movies over 100MB unless you want to pay lots of money. We have Carbonite to backup our hard drives while we do other things -- but that can be heavily bandwidth intensive as well. On Saturday nights I like to use video chatrooms, but forget about that too. Without knowing it, we're easily consuming hundreds of MB (and perhaps more) back in the states. I have satellite at home and regularly complain about the restrictions on it. It just goes to show that until everybody gets fiber to the NIC, we're still going to be sucking wind as far as the possibilities for applications go. Disclaimer: I only have a very limited experience, so I might be way off-base in my analysis.