The MacAlba

I live in a rural location. I have no copper telecommunications cable to the house; in fact I’d have to install a kilometre of cable to get to my property boundary, and then Telstra, the local carrier, would have to lay about 7 km of cable to connect me to the local telephone exchange. But then, the local exchange doesn’t have ADSL or ISDN!

My telephone service is delivered by a voice-over-microwave radio link.

For the past couple of years my internet connectivity has been delivered by 2-way satellite. While I can’t complain (OK, I can think of lots to complain about), it was better than a dialup modem - just. While I could live with a maximum 512 kbit/s downlink speed, the latency injected due to the huge distance the packets had to travel was a major pain in the neck.

Just recently, Telstra, the same local carrier, finally dropped the tariffs on its 3G wireless broadband service. For $129 (which, while expensive, is cheaper than the 2-way satellite), I have managed to get a peak downlink speed of 2600 kbit/s (2.6 Mbit/s) and a latency to my place of work that’s now 100 ms instead of 1700 ms.

I can now access the internet just like most of the rest of the people I know.

Oh yes, and while my monthly quota has now “jumped” from 5 GBytes to 10 Gbytes, I still feel like a poor cousin to those using Comcast in the USA who now have to live within a monthly 250 Gbyte quota. The poor cherubs.