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Its never ends to surprise how Australian public is brainwashed by own government. It’s opposite in Australia, a monopoly of network providers with variety of “competitive” ISPs that have exactly same prices and services. And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else. Any network issues they forward to network provider.


> And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else.

For anybody reading this and thinking it looks reasonable, one outcome of having all these ISP is net neutrality isn't a problem in Australia.

ISP's used to often offer discounted services for certain traffic, like Netflix or traffic that originated in Australia. "Used to" because landline traffic is so cheap now I haven't seen a data limited landline plan in a long while. Charging differently depending on where bytes came from wasn't a problem precisely because there are so many ISP's to chose from. If you didn't like one, move to another. Download limits are still a thing on mobile data plans, so you still occasionally see it happen there.

Also, the NBN isn't technically a monopoly. Anyone is free to pay a third party to run fiber to their house. The NBN is a practical monopoly because it's very expensive to run a new fibre through kilometres of suburban footpaths, and it makes absolutely no sense when the NBN already has fibre in those footpaths and will supply any house beside it with a 1Gbps connection. However, it does make sense for business to run their own fibre because they usually aren't in the burb's (so it's cheap'ish) and don't want to share a line (privacy and predictable latencies), so they often do pay for parties a third part like VOCUS to run fibre to them.

Finally, even though the NBN is a practical monopoly on landline for households, there are competing technologies like 5G and starlink which everyone is free to use. In fact I'm using 5G right at home because I'm waiting for fibre. The reason they don't use it is these competing technologies are slower, have higher latencies, and are more expensive.

I'm not sure who is the brainwashed one here - the Australian public quite correctly understands the vast bulk of Australians have lots of choice on what to internet connection options they have available to them.




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