Why does Australia's internet suck balls?

So now I'm back, from outer space. What's the first thing a self respecting nerd does when he moves into a new house? Internet of course. Followed shortly by rants about the Internet, which is what this is.

This is how it works in Australia. We pay heaps for our Internet. We have slow speeds. We have low data allowances. We get charged heaps for extra usage. Bottom line, we're getting screwed.

Here are some boring graphs from here. The first one is how much we pay on average, the second one is how much we get charged for using extra data.

The reason there are only a few countries on that second graph is that the rest of them don't have download limits. Not only does Australia have limits but we usually charge you a shitload if you exceed them.

Case in point is Telstra. I know they are the worse for value, but to be honest the other Telcos are not that far off them. They have an ADSL 2+ plan for $70/month with 600MB of data. I was a little unsure of just how long it would take to hit that limit so I did a little test. I downloaded a 600MB file. Total download time on my ADSL 2+ connection... 12 mins. That's right, I could use up my whole monthly quota in 12 minutes, after that, the other 43817 minutes in the month, I am charged 15c a megabyte.

Then you have the lock in contracts, the endless product bundles, the deceptive language. Plus this is all being repeated with the increasing use of smartphones (iPhone, 3G phones etc). The data caps and excess usage charges the Telcos apply to these is laughable. The pricing terms, conditions and jargon used make my head hurt.

What is the consequence of all this? We're fucking up Australia's future. We're sacrificing the long term progress of our country for the short term profits of a handful of Telcos.

The Internet changed our lives 10 years ago, now it's a part of our lives. There is so much content out there right now that should be easily accessible by everyone but instead we're all stuck in the mentality that the Internet is a privilege that should be used sparingly.

You might argue that Joe Average doesn't want 400 terraflips of Internet. That might be true now, but I bet anyone using the net now is not going to reduce their usage in the next year. The US has HD blue-ray movies for download at the moment, the average Japanese spends more time online on their phones than their home computers, the iTunes store has sold 200 million TV shows so far. It's clearly only going one way here.

I applaud the current government for investing in this new Broadband network they are all talking about. 100mbps speeds would be a very welcome addition to the market but it will be useless if it's packaged with the same crap that we currently have. I shudder to think what Telstra will charge once they can offer those speeds. The point is that for a large proportion of Australia we already have, or could cheaply build, sufficient infrastructure to access the Internet at close to world leading speeds.

The problem is the current paradigm is to charge and trick users for a service that should be cheap and easy. I have no doubt that ADSL 2+ speeds at $30/month unlimited data usage for 90% of the population could be achieved within the next 6 months and for less than a few hundred million dollars if the government put its might and money behind it.

Australia's future is not in the manufacturing, coal or automotive industries, it's in technology. It's in using our smarts and our privileged position to become world leaders in the new technologies that will emerge in the near future. The Internet is an undeniably vital part of that.

We're shooting ourselves in the foot here.