John Linton
......it was in 1996...or has it drifted in to the orbit of some other planet?
I've mentioned before that Exetel is having difficulties obtaining realistically priced transit bandwidth between Tasmania and Victoria so that we can commission a Hobart, and possibly, Launceston PoP. With the completion of the ACT PoP early next week (The last of the physical 'outside links' was completed yesterday) we have completed the 'Australia Wide' network that we need to deliver a higher level of business and HSPA services in FY2009 as well as reducing some latencies for the customers outside NSW when they access sites within their State or Territory.
The problem is, at least right at this moment, is that Telstra is the only provider of Bass Strait transit and the prices charged for access (at least in the low quantities that Exetel's user's require) means that we could not possibly do anything but lose a lot of money if we had to pay the prices that Telstra charge. Telstra, publicly, cite "capacity" has been reached on their current, two, cables and they have no plans to build another cable as "it can't be justified". Actually I've lost track of the reasons that appear in the press every so often and I've never been able to follow the logic that as there is no more capacity there is also no more demand.
Poor old Tassie has declined in "Telstra importance" in a major, major way since the early days of internet provision in Australia as this 'blast from the past' clearly shows:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961129231438/telstra.net/map.html
As you can see - Tasmania was ranked the same as Perth in getting Telstra internet access in 1996 so much so that out of the total of, the massive, 48 mbps of international bandwidth - Tassie users had one twelfth of the total. I wonder what percentage of the total they have today?
My guess would be that it would most likely be around 0.1%; a drop of 40 times in 12 years.
Clearly the only solution is for the Tasmanian Government, with Federal funding assistance, to lay another cable and make it available to whoever they wanted to at prices that make normal commercial sense - not "Telstra gouge every last cent via monopoly" sense.
Oops - but didn't they just do that? Yes they did - sort of - one of these 'industry participation' things that just never seem to work out the way a government wants them to. There's now a brand new cable still sitting idle since 2004 called BassLink:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink
which has a dark fibre core just waiting to be used - and has been since 2004. The trouble is the nasty Singaporean company that ponied up the money to buy the cable (both the electricity carrying capacity and the data capacity) thinks that Telstra's monopoly pricing is just dandy and is OK with them. The Tassie government is very miffed about this and hence the cable has been idle waiting resolution as to who has what rights to charge what for what and in the mean time Telstra remains the only game in town - I mean the only game in Bass Strait transit and transferring a byte of data over Bass Strait costs as much as it did back in 1996 when this was the 'new dawn' for Telstra's (monopoly) internet access pricing:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961129231504/telstra.net/pricelist.html
How would you, as a residential user, like to be paying those prices today eh? However, believe it or not, those were the prices being paid by ISPs to Telstra in 1996 to run their businesses and if you think bandwidth limits are tiny today and speeds are sub-standard then you either weren't round using the internet in 1996 or, mercifully, you have chosen to forget the experience.
Unfortunately, while those of us who live 'on the Australian mainland' have benefited from competition in the supply of ISP services poor old Tassie is still locked up in the Telstra monopoly and, while perhaps not paying 1996 IP prices, is certainly paying ten times more than any other part of Australia.
There is about to be (and that has been said to me so many times over the past few months that I've lost count) a 'switch on' of the BassLink data service and the pricing is only 3 or 4 times what the price of back hauling data from Perth to Sydney currently is. I haven't seen the 'final' pricing and I certainly haven't seen a believable (SLA based) 'switch on' date but it appears to be closer than it was.
So perhaps Exetel will get it's Hobart PoP operating before we're able to supply HSPA to Tasmanian customers - it's too hard to pick at the moment.
The real solution is for the Tassie Government to build, yet another, cable and ensure that Tasmanians get internet services at the same prices as all other Australians - oops - I forgot - Crazy Kevin and Stupider Stephen are in the process of doing that by the end of 2008.