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I wish someone would throw us Australians a bone and build a couple of more cables. We are suffering from some serious congestion issues at the moment because o

I wish someone would throw us Australians a bone and build a couple of more cables. We are suffering from some serious congestion issues at the moment because of limited capacity leading out of Australia. It is good to see that companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook realise that bettering bandwidth for consumers will benefit them in the long run.

jebblue 11y ago
I heard that, you guys have it terribly slow right now, really wish someone would get Australia and the PI's connected better.
wluu 11y ago
Agreed. And let's not forget our Kiwi neighbours too. Amazon and Microsoft (and others) have Australian based cloud services now, so you'd hope that they might invest in future projects that connect us to the rest of the world. I know SubPartners currently are trying to build up a few undersea cable networks that connect at various points both domestically and internationally.
mapt 11y ago
Just how much money would be required to fix this once and for all, if Australia & New Zealand decided it was a national priority and approached it with an infrastructural rather than profit-oriented basis, with a tolerance for overkill and dark fiber? I have a suspicion that building 40,000 terabits per second in ~10 undersea links with the rest of the world would be a lot less than 1000x as expensive as building a single undersea link at 40 terabits per second, or one new undersea link every two years of economic pain amidst undersupply. The issue is you couldn't charge end-users 1000x more for it, or even 10x more for it, so it doesn't make any sense for private actors to build: ISPs can't reasonably capture value generated in the economy at large. From what I'm told, the US built much of its actual fiber-miles count in the late 1990's when projections were that bandwidth usage would grow exponentially for a long time, and we were "running out" (with a high profit margin on each small step forward to add to the supply). Then we figured out how to do wavelength division multiplexing and all of a sudden an existing fiber could carry 100x more information. This led to the existing players going bankrupt, and the "Dark fiber" era, ten years of overshoot before we started digging fiber lines again domestically on a large scale. This oversupply enabled the Internet in the US to blossom. Last-mile issues were all that existed for the longest time. If we had spent that decade bottlenecked for lack of backbone & backhaul bandwidth, constantly bumping into saturation of the existing links and frenzied construction of new links, the Internet would be a very different place. A more metered place, with a very high degree of rent-seeking by the existing players, and a lot of bandwidth-intensive web ideas killed in their cradles. Apparently in some other developed countries that joined the Internet scene after this boom & bust, the government made it a priority to provide both backbone and last-mile connectivity on an infrastructural basis without much regard to profit, to even better success than the US.
- vacri 11y ago
  if Australia & New Zealand decided it was a national priority and approached it with an infrastructural rather than profit-oriented basis The current conservative government in Australia has decided that internet is a luxury, not a nation-building project, and scuttled the NBN, a project intended to provide infrastructural improvement to the 'tubes. It ain't going to be a 'national priority' here any time soon. Which is weird, because business benefits from fast tubes a lot more than consumers do, and usually the conservatives are the pro-business politicians.
  - bobbles 11y ago
    Especially weird, that now their national long term plans include specifically 'the technology to connect us all together' within the same period of time they canned the NBN!
rasz_pl 11y ago
Australia undersea cables arent the problem, monopoly is. Even your super duper national fiber network has data caps on INTERNAL TRAFFIC. This has nothing to do with intercontinental links, its just greed. Everyone gauges everyone in Australia. Your internet is like your real estate - plenty around and you still pay stupid prices.

jebblue 11y ago

I heard that, you guys have it terribly slow right now, really wish someone would get Australia and the PI's connected better.

wluu 11y ago

Agreed. And let's not forget our Kiwi neighbours too. Amazon and Microsoft (and others) have Australian based cloud services now, so you'd hope that they might invest in future projects that connect us to the rest of the world. I know SubPartners currently are trying to build up a few undersea cable networks that connect at various points both domestically and internationally.

mapt 11y ago

Just how much money would be required to fix this once and for all, if Australia & New Zealand decided it was a national priority and approached it with an infrastructural rather than profit-oriented basis, with a tolerance for overkill and dark fiber? I have a suspicion that building 40,000 terabits per second in ~10 undersea links with the rest of the world would be a lot less than 1000x as expensive as building a single undersea link at 40 terabits per second, or one new undersea link every two years of economic pain amidst undersupply. The issue is you couldn't charge end-users 1000x more for it, or even 10x more for it, so it doesn't make any sense for private actors to build: ISPs can't reasonably capture value generated in the economy at large. From what I'm told, the US built much of its actual fiber-miles count in the late 1990's when projections were that bandwidth usage would grow exponentially for a long time, and we were "running out" (with a high profit margin on each small step forward to add to the supply). Then we figured out how to do wavelength division multiplexing and all of a sudden an existing fiber could carry 100x more information. This led to the existing players going bankrupt, and the "Dark fiber" era, ten years of overshoot before we started digging fiber lines again domestically on a large scale. This oversupply enabled the Internet in the US to blossom. Last-mile issues were all that existed for the longest time. If we had spent that decade bottlenecked for lack of backbone & backhaul bandwidth, constantly bumping into saturation of the existing links and frenzied construction of new links, the Internet would be a very different place. A more metered place, with a very high degree of rent-seeking by the existing players, and a lot of bandwidth-intensive web ideas killed in their cradles. Apparently in some other developed countries that joined the Internet scene after this boom & bust, the government made it a priority to provide both backbone and last-mile connectivity on an infrastructural basis without much regard to profit, to even better success than the US.

vacri 11y ago
if Australia & New Zealand decided it was a national priority and approached it with an infrastructural rather than profit-oriented basis The current conservative government in Australia has decided that internet is a luxury, not a nation-building project, and scuttled the NBN, a project intended to provide infrastructural improvement to the 'tubes. It ain't going to be a 'national priority' here any time soon. Which is weird, because business benefits from fast tubes a lot more than consumers do, and usually the conservatives are the pro-business politicians.
- bobbles 11y ago
  Especially weird, that now their national long term plans include specifically 'the technology to connect us all together' within the same period of time they canned the NBN!

rasz_pl 11y ago

Australia undersea cables arent the problem, monopoly is. Even your super duper national fiber network has data caps on INTERNAL TRAFFIC. This has nothing to do with intercontinental links, its just greed. Everyone gauges everyone in Australia. Your internet is like your real estate - plenty around and you still pay stupid prices.