RE: your question about Australia.
Australia is a funny place. About 17 million people in a place the size of US, but 85% of them are located in 6 cities. Sydney area has about 4 million and so does Melbourne.
They have 5 TV channels now. Some satalite offerings, but I don't think it's very popular. There's a big sat system out of Hong Kong owned by Murdock that will probably reach Aus, but it's very Asia oriented. I wasn't so interested in TV to search it out when I was there.
They just passed a bill to allow Telstra, the state phone company to make time charges for data over local connections (business customers only). Seems like it will stiffle development, but they want Telstra to look good for a public offering coming probably next year. Telstra is very profitable and may be a good invesment. They plan to have an ADR listing.
At my ISP, Telstra provided and maintained the equipment and lines. It was down a lot. In general, in m small town there wasn't a good ISP. Telstra was starting to offer their own service, but in biggest markets first.
They have one company, Optus, that was established to compete(?) withTelstra for cellular and long distance. It seems like they have an agreement to fix prices from a consumer standpoint. Local dialing is normally not a toll, but there is a connect fee. Australia is per capita, one of the largest users of cell phones.
I heard BT has some trunk lines in Australia, but they are not allowed to sell them directly at this time. Also, the link across the ocean is often a block on Internet service as it's over capacity now.
I was talking to a wireless cable (MMDS) provider who said they were also going to issue licenses. I think that would also be competitve. I think Australia's infrastructure is in poor shape. They do seem to be deploying computers in schools.
A good satalite would solve a lot of problems. They really need to get wireless to blanket the country and bring school, telemedicine, entertainment, etc to the "outback". Cable might be good, if they are allowed to bring in the programming. Still, it's a small population. The whole country is only the size of LA.
Hope that helps,
Mark |
