Wading through treacle

Since being back in Australia working the blogs and my corruption website have become an annoying frustration rather than the pleasure they once were. Why?

Australia lags, says net guru

Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, says "real broadband" would allow connections 1000 times the speed of the current average Australian connection - and 80 times the speed the Government and Labor propose.

"Australia is great in terms of the old infrastructure … so you think of yourselves as a modern country", but on internet infrastructure, "Australia ranks 42nd in the world in the cost of internet service, 38th in mobile phone costs, 40th on the availability of skilled labour and engineers, and 20th on scientific infrastructure. If you want your living standard to remain … one of the best in the world, it's going to have to be by adding value in a globally interconnected economy."

Working on the net here is like wading through treacle. Broadband is closer to North American dial up than true broadband. One of the results I have noticed here is a real ignorance of the benefits of various net tools among people here.

Over a decade ago I was at an internet conference in Sydney where Vinton Cerf , inventor of tcp/ip took the then minister for communications to task for Australia’s appalling internet connectivity. Nothing has changed!