My take: Living in Australia, the best thing that we can do to increase the perceived quality of web services in Australia is to subsidise the local hosting of international web companies. It's latency that is killing our experience right now.
The latency between Australia and the internet (hear AWS data centre in Virginia where most startups live, or rely on an API that exists this region) is crazy! It's especially so as companies are starting to push "regular traffic" over to https (even HN is https now). The 4+ requests required to establish an encrypted connection adds up.
Whenever I'm in the Bay Area it feels like the internet is on localhost!
The cost of hosting in Australia is 5-10x that of the states[1].
Whilst it's fun to bash the Coalition’s NBN policy, the Labour party's plan topped out at only 100Mbps (which I'm already getting on Telstra Cable). What really annoys me is that
Australia's cable network is Fibre to the node already[2], and it is already capable of 1Gbps speeds. I hear that Telstra is not offering 1Gbps per second as part of an agreement with NBN Co.
[1] My friends over at orionvm.com gave me a lesson in hosting economics when I wanted to white label their service.
[2] My next door neighbour designed and sold the underlying hardware used on Telstra's coaxial network.
Markus (assuming that's you given the username and proximity to OrionVM) - Labour's plan didn't "top out" at 100Mbps. They merely offered that as the practical maximum when first talking about what hardware they would place in the points of interconnect. About two years ago NBNCo made another announcement that 1Gbps hardware was now cost-effective and they switched to that almost immediately.
I also have not heard the same rumours as you, and would be interested to know more about Telstra's artificial limiting of fibre speeds.
Comments
My take: Living in Australia, the best thing that we can do to increase the perceived quality of web services in Australia is to subsidise the local hosting of international web companies. It's latency that is killing our experience right now.
The latency between Australia and the internet (hear AWS data centre in Virginia where most startups live, or rely on an API that exists this region) is crazy! It's especially so as companies are starting to push "regular traffic" over to https (even HN is https now). The 4+ requests required to establish an encrypted connection adds up.
Whenever I'm in the Bay Area it feels like the internet is on localhost!
The cost of hosting in Australia is 5-10x that of the states[1].
Whilst it's fun to bash the Coalition’s NBN policy, the Labour party's plan topped out at only 100Mbps (which I'm already getting on Telstra Cable). What really annoys me is that
Australia's cable network is Fibre to the node already[2], and it is already capable of 1Gbps speeds. I hear that Telstra is not offering 1Gbps per second as part of an agreement with NBN Co.
[1] My friends over at orionvm.com gave me a lesson in hosting economics when I wanted to white label their service.
[2] My next door neighbour designed and sold the underlying hardware used on Telstra's coaxial network.
Markus (assuming that's you given the username and proximity to OrionVM) - Labour's plan didn't "top out" at 100Mbps. They merely offered that as the practical maximum when first talking about what hardware they would place in the points of interconnect. About two years ago NBNCo made another announcement that 1Gbps hardware was now cost-effective and they switched to that almost immediately.
I also have not heard the same rumours as you, and would be interested to know more about Telstra's artificial limiting of fibre speeds.