Impact of ADSL 2 on Australian ISPs
ADSL2, ADSL2+ – it’s here. The dial-up days are over. Fast internet ADSL 2 is here to stay. But how will Australian networks cope with such high speed now accessible to users? The internet bandwidth in Australia is probably one of the most expensive in the world – and something needs to happen to for us to catch up the rest of the world.
A few noticeable points that can be seen already:
- With some ISPs, the users on ADSL 2 plans experience slow speeds (it kind of doesn’t make sense, does it?). The one that made a lot of noise lately, is Amnet. Here is an article on Whirlpool.
- Australian transit bandwidth providers are not able to offer high enough speeds to cater for the demand. Think for yourself – it’ll only take 50 users, downloading at 20Mbps each at the same time to fill in a 1Gbps pipe. Australian ISPs still count bandwith in MBs, whereas everywhere in the world it’s mostly GBs!
- Some ISPs use hardware that is not able to support even high local traffic. They are now shaping P2P traffic – e.g., Exetel.
- Peering traffic (WAIX, PIPE etc) is no longer free. Most ISPs offered it free/un-shaped/un-counted before. Not anymore.
So, where is it all going to? What’s the point of having ADSL 2 if you can download less and often at a slower speed than before? It’ll be interesting to see what happens when more ISPs go ADSL2+. Will it be the end of the Internet in Australia?