Contrary To What Vivid Wireless Seem To Think Not All Of Australia Lives In The Stone Age
This might shock the folks over at Vivid Wireless but there are people in Australia that aren’t living in what most of the first world would consider the stone age of broadband and video, at least as far as usage goes. I had a brief look at the collective circlejerk on Whirlpool just now after seeing an advert for Vivid on TV while making my lunch and all I could think of was ‘lol’. Ok, so Vivid clearly hasn’t got 4G yet even though they advertise it, but the claims that when it happens it will blow ADSL2+ out of the water? I’m not seeing what appears to be 10mbit coming even close to blowing 24mbit away.
I’m going to shy away from the speed issue seeing as it’s well known that Australia has shit speeds no matter what. What prompted this post was the traffic restrictions they seem to impose, and more specifically their bullshit calculator. For starters, I cranked their usage calculator dials until I got my current monthly usage (if it wasn’t for my pesky lack of HDD space anyway.) The calculator then told me I was best suited for their 40GB plan, about 200GB short of what I actually use. This irked me a bit, how can an ISP that offers home connections not have a plan bigger than 40GB, given it costs $100 monthly.
I decided to take a look at what they consider average use. For starters, a TV episode for Vivid is about 1.3GB and is watched on ABC iView and YouTube, as opposed to downloading something that’s actually worth watching. Streaming is NOT the answer, everyone is a dirty pirate and a real ISP would know that. I was also a bit put off by what they consider the size of one movie. At first I suspected 700mb for an average shitty XviD encode but it turned out to be worse, but unsurprising. 3.4GB, the size of a common DVD online download. Hi guys, welcome to the age of bluray, where a single movie is usually 45GB if directly pulled from the disc, or if you had some cool compression going and properly encoded audio it’d be around 12GB. It’d be nice if HD movies were made available intelligently but that’s a pipedream for now.
I don’t understand how an ISP that’s supposedly done so much research has NO FUCKING CLUE about their own target audience. They rabbit on about having the latest technology and knowing what the market wants but when it comes down to it, a regular user is going to go with something far cheaper like Telstra’s 3G with it’s superior coverage. They don’t notice the speed difference or even care about it, Telstra is a name they trust. On the other side, the more technologically inclined users wouldn’t ever go for plans that are so restrictive.
Obviously my own ISP has silly rules regarding copyright and what a user downloads, but they aren’t stupid about enforcing them (having a few servers in Europe really helps) and I haven’t had any problem from Amnet yet concerning my huge and blatant copyright violations. Probably not the smartest thing to write about on the internet when I think about it. I don’t see the police here giving a shit about a few hundred grand worth of software, music, and video content though. (This is where I go “lolitrollu”)
To wrap up, Amnet recently upgraded all their plans up until the one just below mine, so $200/mo gets you 100/150GB while $99/mo gets you 70/140GB. For 40GB less the price difference is huge, but it’s mostly stripped from the peak. I might consider switching though, who knows.
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I was thinking that in France we are very retarded with Internet Technology but we have ADSL2+ with no limitation like your fucking ISP ^^
“I’m not seeing what appears to be 10mbit coming even close to blowing 24mbit away.”
i dont know what part of Aus you’re in, but id like to see any normal household around my area approach 24MB/s, most people here get 200kb/s if we’re lucky and we’re paying for 1.5MB/s (we’re not even getting that!)
i think vivid’s main idea is to provide fast internet to places like this which simply CANT get high speed net, not even 3G is fast here
At least as far as Perth metro area goes, anyone who is on an ADSL 2+ capable line can get a minimum of 4mbit. I get around 6mbit and I’m over 2KM away from my DSLAM. Perth has enough DSLAM’s scattered around that anyone living within about 200m of one can get full 24mbit while under 1KM away is still capable of 10mbit, which is about what Vivid are offering. I wouldn’t say everyone gets these speeds but a pretty big majority, at least in metro areas, seem to be. Vivid are not really targeting the country, the metro zones seem to be their thing, and that’s where these speeds are pretty common. I know a lot of the newer suburbs here all have fibre to the DSLAM which gives people a clean 24mbit regardless of distance, if only they weren’t so crippled by quotas.
I just wanted to thank you for this. I was just thoroughly looking into Vivid considering joining up and I found this very useful as a ‘devil’s advocate’ to my impulse buying tendencies.
I think in terms of the comparison to 700mb to what their calc thingy is doing is due to the fact that they are targeting an ‘ideal’ world where we buy all our music from itunes, stream all our video from netflix, whilst getting all our unbiased news from the cooporate bodies of channel Seven and The West Australian.
I do find the ability to use it almost anywhere quite a perk though and pricing comparisons with whats available over here in a state we dub ‘Wait Awhile’, so I will continue to look into it. Compatability of their gear with Linux may be a problem though.
Also I am interested in the difference between 4G as they are selling it and WiMax, which is what I think it actually is.