LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Simon Hackett <simon@internode.com.au>
  To  : Chris Yeoh <cyeoh@samba.org>
        Mark Newton <newton@atdot.dotat.org>
  Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 11:26:45 +0930

Re: FW: Big Pond Direct ADSL Launch (fwd)

At 4:53 PM -0700 28/5/01, Chris Yeoh wrote:
>On Tue, May 29, 2001 at 12:09:09AM +0930, Mark Newton wrote:
>  >
>  > Compare an Australian $39.95 dialup account to a US $39.95 dialup account
>  > and you can even put up a pretty good case to say that .au ISPs are
>  > sometimes 50% the price of US ISPs.
>
>I agree that the currency conversion rates should be taken into
>account when comparing prices, but hey for US$40/mnth I had a 2MB/s
>cable connection (which wasn't oversubscribed). And for about
>US$50/month you could get over 250 cable TV channels[1].

US$40/mth -> circa A$80 per month right now.

It is possible to pay less than that for a 1.5 megbit ADSL service, 
and only the equivalent of US$5 more than that for a -good- 1.5 
megabit ADSL service, today, in SA.

>It seems to be just a fact of life (for perfectly reasonable reasons
>which I understand) that if you want technology related products or
>services in Australia you will be paying a larger proportion of your
>income than if you lived in the US. As for rent, well thats a
>completely different matter....

See above. I think that given the substantially higher costs imposed 
on -any- country other than the USA to access the Internet (because 
the USA pays none, nada, zip, zilch towards the international link 
costs concerned, there is no 'peering' of international transport 
costs in the Internet space), the fact that we've hit cost parity is 
nothing short of remarkable.

It says that the Australian situation represents -better- value for 
money than the US situation does. Not worse.

>
>Chris.
>
>[1] Yes, its 99% crap, but given that you can only watch one
>show at a time, there was always something decent on.
>--

Bullshit :) I've been there too, you can't fool me, they're -all- crap.

Simon


---
Simon Hackett, Technical Director, Internode Systems Pty Ltd
31 York St [PO Box 284, Rundle Mall], Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia
Email: simon@internode.com.au  Web: http://www.on.net
Phone: +61-8-8223-2999          Fax: +61-8-8223-1777

-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject