Australia And The Price Of Data

4:16 Jul 8th, 2009 | 0 notes

Just for today I thought I’d blog about the more traditional subjects I normally write on.

I was reading an interesting article in this month’s WIRED magazine. It was talking about data and how this century has brought about great waste in data compared with last century when data was rare and precious. Think about it, last century, data wouldn’t have been used for such frivolous things as videos of a cat swinging from a fan or videos of your drunken friend at a party. Data was too expensive to waste on such puerile things. Then think about this: Youtube and other video sites are using data for exactly these things. Data has become so cheap that people use it like the air we breathe. Conserving data is something we just don’t have to think about anymore.

This then got me thinking; Australia has the complete opposite mindset. Just look at our internet services. Telstra’s (Australia’s largest telecom company) best cable broadband plan under $100 has a 25GB cap, and it costs $80 a month. To get any more data you need to move up to the $130 a month plan which only gets you 60GB. Compare this with the US and their 250GB plans and you begin to see that Australia really doesn’t understand that the true cost of data is nothing.

Additionally, have a look at Telstra’s email storage. You’ll be surprised to see that the amount of storage customers receive is 20, not gigabytes, but megabytes. In 2009, Australians are paying good money for 20MB of storage. Let’s compare this with the US again. Gmail, Live Mail and Yahoo all offer free inboxes into the gigabytes of storage, and growing.

So here Australia is in the 21st century; separated from the rest of the world not only by distance, but also technology. If Australia plans to keep up with the information explosion happening throughout the rest of the world, we better wake up and see that this isn’t the 90s anymore.