State of the Internet in Australia

The National Broadband Network (NBN) is Australia's national wholesale communications network whish id currently being built to bring high speed broadband and telephone services throughout Australia. Depending on where you live in the country the roll out may have already happened or unfortunately may take as long as another decade before it gets to your home, school or workplace.

Given the great expense of this major infrastructure project there has been considerable debate about the cost and method of delivering the project. With the change of Federal Government in 2013 from Labor to Liberal & National Coalition the NBN was placed under a strategic review in an effort to reduce the cost from $72 billion dollars.

As an outcome of this budgeting exercise the NBN Co's strategic review has decided to reduce costs of the broadband architecture by using a mixture of technologies, including fibre to the node (FttN) and use of existing hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) would be implemented rather than the original fibre to the home (FttH)  where the optical fibre is installed right to the premises.

So what does that mean in terms of internet speed?

The Australian Labor Party was offering between 25Mbps and up to 100Mbps download, and 1Mbps up to 40Mbps upload on FttH. The plan was to offer 1Gbps on fibre in the future. On fixed wireless 25Mbps download and 5Mbps upload.

Whereas the Coalition are now promising between 25Mbps and up to 100Mbps download by 2016, increasing to between 50Mbps and up to 100Mbps by 2019 with No minimum upload speeds given.

As of 2014 pre NBN, Australia is ranked 30th in the world with an average peak connection speed of 30.1 megabits per second (Mbps), according to Akamai's latest State of the Internet report. This is a 32 per cent increase from the same period a year ago, when the nation ranked 36th with an average peak speed of 22.8 Mbps.

The top 20 countries for fast internet:

1. Hong Kong, 65.4 Mbps
2. South Korea, 63.6 Mbps
3. Japan, 52 Mbps
4. Singapore, 50.1 Mbps
5. Israel, 47.7 Mbps
6. Romania, 45.4 Mbps
7. Latvia, 43.1 Mbps
8. Taiwan, 42.7 Mbps
9. Netherlands, 39.6 Mbps
10. Belgium, 38.5 Mbps
11. Switzerland, 38.4 Mbps
12. Bulgaria, 37 Mbps
13. United States, 37 Mbps
14. Kuwait, 36.4 Mbps
15. United Arab Emirates, 36 Mbps
16. Britain, 35.7 Mbps
17. Canada, 34.8 Mbps
18. Czech Republic, 34.8 Mbps
19. Macau, 34.4 Mbps
20. Sweden, 33.1 Mbps

 

Figures are average peak connection speeds in megabits per second. Source: Akamai

Social Media Breakfast Club

This morning I attended a free Social Media networking club in Melbourne. It was the first time I had attended the breakfast get together and I had a inspirational time. It was great to see so many passionate people of all ages willing to share ideas and chat about all things to do with social technology.

As a newcomer to the club which I fortuitously discovered via #socialmelb on Twitter, the club is friendly and relaxed. I made some time to chat with the organiser Kate Kendal who is the online editor of Marketingmag.com.au and she said the idea behind the meet was for an information conversation for like minded individuals. The club's website reads;

"Tweeters, bloggers, social commentators – come one, come all.
Every Friday morning at 8am Melbourne Social Media experts, newbies and everyone in between is invited to join us at our weekly social media coffee morning.
We enjoy idle chit chat, serious sharing of thoughts and information, a laugh and a smile, and of course, a good brew of coffee"

It was well worth braving the cold early winter morning. I’m so looking forward to the next meet.

Australians embrace Social Networking

According to a report by Matt Dickman's from Facebook's advertising statistics; Australia ranks seventh place in the Top Ten number of Users by country.

Pretty interesting given our small population, it would suggest Facebook is used by a quarter of Australia's online population. The top 10 are USA, UK, Canada, Turkey, France, Italy, Australia, Chile, Colombia and Spain.

A trillion unique URLs

Google recently detected more than a trillion unique URLs on the Web.
The vast majority of the world’s domain registrations are Top Level Domain (TLD). A Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) is a Domain extension that represents geographical regions such as .uk for United Kingdom.

The top 10 ccTLD's are

1. .de (Germany)
2. .cn (China)
3. .uk (United Kingdom)
4. .nl (Netherlands)
5. .eu (European Union)
6. .ar (Argentina)
7. .it (Italy)
8. .us (United States)
9. .br (Brazil)
10. .ch (Switzerland)

There are over seven million .uk domain names registered. Uk is the third largest ccTLD, with both .cn (China) and .de (Germany) both having over 12 million domain name registrations.
The Italian ccTLD(.it), has passed 1.5 million registrations. .it is the fifth ccTLD in Europe and the seventh in the world to reach this milestone. Today there are more than 1,553,000 names registered.

The .nl ccTLD has reached three million domain registrations, making it the largest ccTLD when one looks at the number of domain names registered per person with almost one domain name for every five Dutch people. It is also the fourth largest ccTLD in terms of total registrations behind .cn, .de and .uk.

Spain's ccTLD, .es, passed the one million mark reports Sedo. The passing of the milestone occurred much more rapidly following liberalisation of the registration rules in the .es name space two years ago.

The number of ccTLD in Australia is also
over 1.1 million.

This total is made up of the following groups

.com.au 1,036,390

.net.au 115,664

.org.au 34,734

.asn.au 3,515

.id.au 9,062

Total .AU 1,199,365

Registration of a business, company or domain name does not in itself give you any proprietary rights-only a trade mark can give you that kind of protection. The same word(s) may be registered by different people as business names and trade marks. However, the registered trade mark owner can sue the business owner for infringing the trade mark if the business name owner uses it on goods or services similar to those covered by the trade mark registration.