For Australians, about 99% of our digital connectivity to the rest of the world comes through underwater subsea cables. We currently own or operate about 400,000km of these cables across the ocean floor – so much in fact, that you could lap the world 10 times with that amount of cable.
The universities of Melbourne and Wollongong began sharing files on a dial-up line in the 1970s using two Unix-based computers. In its infancy in Australia, the internet was mainly utilised by computer scientists.
Telstra – Best for Connection/Speed
In fact, more than 40 percent of the Internet connections in Australia are with Telstra.
Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications provider, had the majority retail market share of internet access services in 2021, followed by Optus.
The high costs:
Most consumers use the services of Telstra and Optus telecommunications companies in Australia. With Telstra monopolizing the market as it owns the majority of the internet infrastructure, they charge high costs for providing high-quality internet services.
Singapore tops the list with fixed internet speed being five times faster than Australia's. Hong Kong, Monaco, Romania and South Korea make up the top five while India ranks 67th on the list with a broadband speed of 41.1 megabits per second.
Both the Coalition and Labor have plans to upgrade the NBN to FTTP. In late 2020, the Coalition announced $4.5 billion in upgrades to 8 million premises to get speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) by 2023. That's about 20 times faster than the 50 megabits per second (Mbps) home plan.
"There's a need for government to realise that Australia is currently ranked as a third-world nation in telecommunications and digital services." The National Broadband Network has cost taxpayers in excess of $57 billion, according to the Labor federal government.
Australia now ranked 74th in the world when it comes to fixed broadband speeds, with a median download speed of 52.75 Mbps, uploads of 17.78Mbps, and latency of 11ms.
Singtel Optus Pty Limited (commonly referred to as Optus) is an Australian telecommunications company headquartered in Macquarie Park, New South Wales, Australia. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singaporean telecommunications company Singtel.
Telstra owns and operates the network of copper wires that is currently used to carry most telephone calls and internet traffic within Australia over fixed telephone and broadband connections. Mobile services are provided over different networks.
Everyone owns the internet
The physical networks that carry internet traffic between different systems is the internet backbone. In the beginning days of the internet, ARPANET made up this backbone. Today, several large corporations provide the routers and cable that make it up.
98% of all international Internet traffic flows through an immense network of undersea cables. This infrastructure crosses seas and oceans all over the globe to connect countries such as China and the United States, Portugal and India or South Africa and Malaysia.
The National Broadband Network (NBN) is an Australian national wholesale open-access data network. It includes wired and radio communication components rolled out and operated by NBN Co, a Government-owned corporation.
The Internet developed from the ARPANET, which was funded by the US government to support projects within the government and at universities and research laboratories in the US – but grew over time to include most of the world's large universities and the research arms of many technology companies.
We can say that internet speeds such as 7G or 8G are provided in Norway. Norway's top telecom service provider 'Telenor' increased the speed of personal internet usage in September last year. There are a total of three telecom companies in Norway, including Telenor, which have established their own mobile network.
Affluent regions have the fastest internet speeds
For example, Monaco tops the list with the highest average download speed and GDP per capita. In 2022, the city-state was estimated to be worth a staggering 204,190 USD per capita by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
As reported by Akamai, Canada's average broadband connection speed is higher than Australia's but speeds in both countries are below those in the US and many European and Asian countries.
Over-provisioning in Australia is set by NBN Co, while in New Zealand this is controlled by individual internet providers. While NBN Co only over-provisions downlinks, New Zealand providers allow extra speed for both downloads and uploads.
au is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Australia.
5G promises to be much faster than the NBN, just as reliable and with ultra-low latency. What remains to be seen however is the cost of data on the 5G network and the issue of coverage across Australia.