I was listening to the ABC?s AM program this morning and low and behold they started talking to Helen Coonan, Australian Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. The story was about the majority government owned telecommunications provider Telstra & how they have pulled out of developing their so called fibre to the node service. (This is code for RIM?s with ADSL 2+ Mini-muxes)
The following is a response to a question she was asked:
GILLIAN BRADFORD: So when can you tell consumers that they are going to get faster Internet speeds?
HELEN COONAN: Well, already they get in the areas that Telstra were proposing to roll out fibre, multi-megabit speeds on technology called ADSL 2plus, that’s up to 12 megabits. There are not very many consumers who need speeds over 12 megabits.
How interesting, for a starters ADSL 2 Plus is capable of 24 megabits (stupid cow), and secondly how do you know that we have no need for these speeds? If we had the speeds we would then be able to access new services that require the higher speeds, but because we don’t have these higher speeds Australia is lagging (all nerds laugh here) behind the rest of the world.