IIS Aid

I have not been this excited over my Internet connection in many years. In fact there have only been three distinct moments in the 10 years I have been using the Internet that I would say have really stood out as landmark events. The first one was back in the mid 90's when I got my first 28.8kbps connection, the second was in early 2001 when I first got my own ADSL broadband connection, and then there is now.

Up until the 90's Australia's telecommunications industry was totally government owned and run, and even once the market was opened up to competition this once government owned giant had a total monopoly on the industry. Even if you didn't use them directly, you were garanteed that the ISP you choose were. This one company were able to dictate the market resulting in high prices and limited connection speed options compared to the rest of the developed world. Until now that is, as my new ISP only offers ADSL at the maximum possible speed, and with a potential of 8Mbit download and 1Mbit upload a whole new world of Internet is opened up.
The theorectical limit of ADSL 1 is 8Mbit download and 1 Mbit upload, but this is never reached in real terms. At present users in Australia seem to be getting between 5 and 7 Mbit download and pretty close to the full 1 Mbit upload speed, which is blindingly fast in just about anyones books. Over the weekend I gave this new found speed a run for it's money to see what it could deliver, and well I'll let the pictures to the talking.

I got the above speed while downloading some drivers from an international site, and I have now gone from a 512 kbps connection to somewhere between 5.6 and 5.8 Mbit. Internet access at close to LAN speeds. What's even better is that even though my Internet is now 10 times faster than what I had prior, it is also now amazingly enough almost half the cost.

How can they do this? Well, for this we come back to the monopoly thing. Up until recently all ISP's in Australia were simply wholesaling their ADSL services through this one giant telco company. As mentioned earlier this meant that even if you were not using this telco as your ISP directly, you were still tied into their infrastructure as ISP's had no other choice but to use their equipment for provisioning ADSL services. What my new ISP (iiNet) and a few other big ADSL based ISP's have done is rolled out their own DSLAM equipment into the exchanges at huge cost, but in doing so freeing themselves almost completely of this monopoly. Due to this new found freedom these ISP's are now free to offer any connection speed supported by ADSL, and at any cost that is viable. The result in my case is an ADSL connection which is a staggering 10 times faster, at a mindblowing 53.3% of the cost. You don't have to be a genius to see where the better value sits.