Broadband? What Broadband?

Australia’s a funny place. I’ve lived here a bit over ten years now and it never ceases to surprise me. Sometimes the surprises are good – like finding a 2 metre carpet python sunbathing in my garden. Sometimes they are bad – like finding that you can’t get broadband even in the major cities.

I live in Brisbane, Australia’s 3rd largest city. I live in the Brisbane suburb of Karana Downs. Brisbane is a big city. It has almost 2 million people in it and is growing fast. A city this size dwarfs most of the other places I’ve lived. Take Haslingfield, an English village in the East of England. Haslingfield has a population of about 3,000. The nearest ‘city’ is Cambridge, about 12 km away. The population of Cambridge is only about 300,000 and yet, in Haslingfield, I had fibre-optic cable to my door way back in the mid 1990s. The same in Auegstertal, a tiny little place with a few dozen houses, some way out from Zurich in Switzerland – itself with a population of less than half a million. Twelve years ago, I had cable in Auegstertal. Yet here in Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, I can’t even get a primitive ADSL broadband service! Not even ADSL!

To be fair, I don’t live in the centre of Brisbane – where they do have broadband – cable even, some of them – I live in an outer suburb. But, when I hear from a friend of mine that he has bought an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in rural France and even there he can get 2Mb/s broadband, my blood boils. The fact that Queensland’s state slogan is ‘Queensland: The Smart State’ is clearly just wishful thinking.

For someone like me, whose livelihood is the Web and whose hobbies are very bandwidth-intensive (ever tried uploading a 5Mb MP3 to your band’s website at 56Kb modem speeds?), not having broadband for my home office is a huge nuisance that is building year by year into a catastrophe. Yet even for my wife, who is not into technology for its own sake like me, this is becoming a problem. She has an iPod and likes to listen to podcasts from the BBC and ABC. She has friends and family in the UK and elsewhere who increasingly often send her video clips, sets of holiday snaps, and animated jokes or cards. Because broadband has been such a normal part of their lives for so long, they don’t realise that files like this will tie up our phone line for hours as we wait for the mail to download.

And if it’s happening to me and my wife, it must be happening to millions of other ordinary Australians. Little by little, week by week, we are being excluded, cut off from the ordinary concourse of the rest of the world. It is very, very frustrating.

And why? Oh, don’t get me started on how stuffed up Australian politics is and how little competition there is in the Australian telecoms industry, or how a few big commercial interests appear to control the government’s whole media agenda. It’s pathetic. This is a country that has only a handful of big cities – one of the most intensely urbanised countries in the whole world – and yet they can’t get broadband out even to people in the state capitals.