AAPT offer Australian-first Unlimited ADSL2+, music subscription
Finally an Australian ISP – AAPT is putting their balls on the line with an unlimited ADSL2+ offer at an affordable price. Unlimited offers have come and gone in the past, but not at ADSL2 speeds. This is an Australian-first, a very welcome one. A critical point to the unlimited downloads is the cost, how much I hear you ask.. only A$99.95. Whilst that may sound like a lot for some, I can tell you we pay more than that for 50GB right now.
Called the ‘Entertainment Bundle’ there are a couple of catches. It does require you to sign up for a 2 year contract, costing you a minimum of A$2398.80. You’ll also need to bundle your phone, but you do get free line rental.
AAPT say that by introducing this they hope other ISP’s follow suit. Ultimately competition is a great thing for consumers, hopefully this will lead to a lowering for the cost of broadband in general across Australia. If the plan is successful, other ISPs are sure to follow suit. To never have to worry about download caps would fundamentally change the consume content. Being able to absorb as much content as we like with no restriction is an incredibly exciting concept.
It’s interesting to note the traditionally uncapped US ISPs have recently began introducing download caps of around 250GB, admittedly, most users won’t run into a cap of this size. With an ambitious offer like this, two major questions spring to mind.
Availability – with prices less than what some users pay for 50GB, if you can suck up the 2 year contract, a lot of users will be all over this. The question is, where is this available ? Unfortunately only ADSL is available here in Wodonga with AAPT – the same unlimited deal costs more on ADSL 1 – A$109.95. I suspect this is due to them renting equipment from other providers.
Infrastructure – the second question is what happens if it’s successful. There’s no doubt AAPT are taking a massive gamble on this new offer. A gamble that will either highlight them as an innovative ISP willing to push the boundaries of what internet costs in Australia, or will the demand melt the AAPT infrastructure, leaving customers locked into a broken service for 2 years ? Only time will tell, certainly one to watch.
As if the deal needed to get sweater, AAPT are also offering unlimited music streaming of more than 1 million tracks on the AAPT music store. Also included (I know this really does sound to good to be true), you get to spent $50 to buy tracks to keep. By today’s music standards, these should be DRM-free. Each track costs A$1.69, so you get around 30 per month.
If you can get it will you ? Does the 2 year contract scare you off ? – You can check availability by entering you phone number on the AAPT site.
More @ AAPT via Long Zheng
The Australian Internet Filter – Facts. Thoughts. Action.
Unless you were living under a rock, you’d no doubt be aware by now that yesterday the Australian government re-affirmed its commitment to introducing a mandatory ISP-level internet filter. There’s been a lot said about it in the past 24 hours. Before giving my response, I want to outline the fact, then my opinion.
The Facts
Outlined on the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s blog, the Internet filter is one part of an overall cyber-safety plan for which the government has committed $125.8 Million over the next four years. The “Measures include increased funding towards cyber-safety education and awareness raising activities, content filtering and law enforcement”.
Yesterday (15/12/09), Senator Stephen Conroy, the Minister for DBCDE released to the public an overdue ISP Content Filtering Pilot Report from Enex Testlab. The purpose of this report was to test “a number of factors, including accuracy, effectiveness, impact on network speeds (performance), the relative ease of circumvention and the costs to implement.”
Current laws enable authorities to prosecute publishers of illegal content, but Australian law is powerless to impact servers located overseas. At most they can issue a takedown notice when the ISP / website owner can effectively choose if they comply with. The filter is designed to tackle that issue by blocking content that is ‘Refused classification’.
Conroy will present new legislation amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act early next year when the parliament resumes. If successful, the ISP-level filter would be implemented in 2011.
The idea has generated wide-spread large-scale public opposition.
My Thoughts
Let’s start at the start of the issue.. Where did the need for a filter come from ? Who’s demanding this ? And where’s the evidence. If there were parents out there screaming for a government solution to internet content safe filters, they were certainly slow to adopt the FREE opt-in security software offered by the previous government. The uptake was so poor, the program was scrapped. So why is Stephen Conroy so passionate to implement this? All he seems to get for his trouble is massive opposition and outright hate for the guy. This is an issue he’s putting his job on the line for, why, I have no idea.
I have serious questions about the report itself. Critical detail pertaining to which ISP was testing which product and what the users were actually doing when getting when the benchmarking on their connection was being performed. General browsing, gaming, torrenting, P2P, IM ? All of these things use the network differently and could potentially be impacted in different ways. Also in the Q&A, it mentions that all devices (mobile, console, etc) that connect to the internet will be filtered. My question is, why was only regular computer connections tested in the trial ?
Whilst supposed thousands of ‘real people’ were tested, we get the results of only a few at the end of the document. Of which results seem to fluctuate dramatically. For a credible conclusion to be reached for the aim of the report, the best filter would need to be selected, then tested against every possible scenario to ensure business and consumers aren’t impacted.
You may read the report lists the filter got 100% accuracy.. and if I provide a list of 10 sites to my router it’ll block 100% of those sites as well. This does not equal a successful filter and brings me to the inherit flaw of a blacklist. Content is created at such a rate that a blacklist will never keep up, there will never be enough manpower at ACMA to overcome this. Ever.
The result of the filters introduction will likely drive those exchanging illegal material underground (read: encrypted VPN/SSL). Despite the report being 97 pages long, it has no references to SSL. Encrypted traffic that won’t be filtered.
What can be done ?
The Press Release from Conroy yesterday clearly shows that no matter what the evidence or public opinion, he seems unequivocally persistent to get this filter implemented. There’s one single thing he can change that would end all of this opposition.. make it opt-in, rather than mandatory.
Whilst there’s some that subscribe to the every little bit helps camp, personally I think a lot of time and effort is being wasted doing things that won’t make a lick of difference. Changing your twitter avatar, unfollowing @kevinruddPM are just a couple of examples that have sprung up in the last couple of days. There’s thousands of websites out there that feature the No Clean Feed banner and what difference has that made ? I guess it has the chance to gain further publicity of the issue, but at this point it seems Conroy is set to proceed regardless of any amount of negative feedback on the issue.
Right now it seems the opposition hasn’t made up its mind on the issue, with Tony Abbott today saying he wasn’t across the issue to decide either way. Perhaps this is our opportunity to campaign to the opposition, help make up their minds and oppose the legislation.
Also don’t waste your time with online polls, in particular ones like SMH which results can easily be games by deleting your cookies and voting again. The results of these can’t be used as evidence in the case against the internet filter and simply serve for providing page visits to that site.
Resources
The official press release
Details of the overall Cyber-safety plan
Filtering Report
Frequently Asked Questions
Refused Classification Consultation paper
The issue has now attracted worldwide attention, being picked up by ArsTechnica and the BBC. You can watch or contribute to the Twitter conversation by using the hash tag #nocleanfeed. The hash tag has been a trending topic for the best part of the last 24 hours.
Kindle for PC beta now available
If your still waiting for your Kindle hardware to arrive, you may want to start your Kindle experience with Kindle for PC.
There’s great support for Windows 7, complete with Jump Lists and a great Amazon icon to pin to your Taskbar.
Available @ Amazon
Bing is off to the races, Melbourne Cup image
Check out today’s image on Bing. It’s very timely to match in with today’s big race – The Melbourne Cup. Rolling over the image you’ll see a number of square that link off to associated racing stories, one noteworthy item is the Birdseye view of the Flemington racecourse.
Australian streets getting viewed by Google again
Google maps and more specifically street view in Australia is about to get an upgrade. Next month the street view cars will be back on our streets in force, snapping updated photos of Australia.
When street view first launched one of my biggest questions was how Google would deal with the currency of images. With photographing each street being such a massive undertaking, they could be excused for leaving the current batch of images up for years.
After launching in August last year, Google are sending their fleet to “Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and parts of Tasmania”.
The new Australian imagery will be available sometime within the next year..
More info @ Google Australia blog via news.com.au
The Complete Guide to Google Wave
If you got a Google Wave invite, logged in and checked it out, then were left scratching your head as to what the heck you would ever use Wave for, then check out http://completewaveguide.com/
It’s a free, online, constantly updating, comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash
New Internode Plans on new link, disappointing
Internode have updated their broadband plans, in preparation for the new international connection finally coming online. The new plans will be active from this Thursday 8/10/09.
From October 6th 2009 a range of new broadband plans has been launched by Internode. We’re passing on to customers the benefits of the PIPE PPC-1 fibre-optic link, which goes live this Thursday.
PPC-1, an undersea cable that links Sydney with the western Pacific island of Guam, delivers a significant increase in Australia’s international data interconnection, thereby reducing data transfer costs. From Guam, Internode uses other cable systems to link through to the USA and beyond.
The new cable was supposed to dramatically reduce broadband costs and increase download quotas. Unfortunately the reality is a fairly incremental change in plans. The biggest (read:highest promoted) change is the Easy Broadband Plan which updates from 30GB to 50GB download quota.
Personally I’ve been on the ADSL TwoPlus 40GB plan. Apparently that’s no longer available in the new plans. The new options are 25GB for $89.95 or 50GB for $115.95.
Most current customers can stay on their existing plans, however that’s not really the point here is it. The new cable was supposed to bring lower prices and higher downloads, for my situation, this hasn’t been the case.
I understand TwoPlus plans have a piggyback on Telstra’s equipment, attracting a much higher cost than Internode’s normal ADSL2+ plans. So is Telstra to blame here ?
Overall the plan changes aren’t as dramatic as expected, which leaves a lot of people feeling disappointed. Head over to the Whirlpool forums or watch twitter to keep track of public opinion. Also leave your thoughts in the comments.
More @ Internode