About four years ago I lived two miles from AOL’s world headquarters. Smack bam in the boom. We could not get broadband in our development for the same reason, and the cable company (comcast IIRC), which had a local monopoly had not bothered to do broadband in our area. Couldn’t believe it. We were in a high tech region and couldnt get broadband.

When we built five years ago we put in ethernet cable to all the houses hoping to share broadband. It took all that time to get it up.

We are 6km frm the Hobart GPO and broadband over a line (ADSL or fibre) is still impossible so we went for a Dad and Dave company (run by radio tech and computer nerds in their spare time) http://www.tasmanet.com.au for a wireless linkprobbably further than from Hall to Black Mountain tower and straight over the top of our GPO.

It works okay except when it rains and when ten household teenagers go online in the evening and do more than chat. But its $100 per month for 12 households and an office and some do VoIP.

the reason we cannot get ADSL is becuase we have a fibre optic cable to a mini-exchange which does not do ADSL, even if we were close enough to the main exchange the fibre optic stuff that up. And the fibre optic goes past no houses at all.

When we moved in it took over a year to get our phones connected to the mini-exchange down the road as Telstra was in dispute with some supplier and the old equipment could handle 12 new phones (yes that’s right, some 6km from the GPO and they couldn’t cope with new phones, like we were out in woop woop or something)

Some of the inertia comes from the fact that some households just don’t see the point. I mean I’ve got VoIP and set it up with my older ACT in-laws when were there but they just don’t like it. I’ve got no one to ring, so its real cheap.

My local exchange has ADSL2+ with huge speeds for lower than ordinary 512 adsl charges but, and its a big but, at the moment you have to stop your current ADSL and wait perhaps up to 3 weeks to get connected to adsl2+, so that effectively means no internet or mail for 3 weeks. Seems madness and has a whiff of Telstra nastyness about it if you ask me. Rapid changeover is supposed to be here by xmas – then i’ll be on it as quick as a mozzie on a redhead’s arm at a bbq.

As far as phone calls go I do a lot of Skype overseas for free Skype to Skype. My brother lives in Scotland and works in the oil industry, his USA company uses Skype internationally for business.

For long distance in Oz a few country cousins have this Telstra deal, where they pay, I think, about $70 fixed a month and get all you can eat phone calls STD etc. So we ring them for 10 seconds or text them on mobile and they ring us.

For other International calls, to say my daughter in Taiwan, the Phone Cards can’t be beaten. We get about 15 hours for $10 through normal phone to phone. Telstra would charge me between $720 and $1089 for that depending on what plan i use. Yes those figures are correct. I think the cards re-route through both VoIp and spot market telco lines, the quailty can vary but is uusually as good as normal phone. If it isn’t you just ring back in a second or so and see how it goes. You can get similar cards for each country or region and also internally in Oz.

All the VoIP deals I have looked at are dearer than the cards and less convienient.

Gizmo Project, a similar free product to Skype, offers the same as Skype PLUS FREE calls to landlines and mobiles of other Gizmo subscribers (limited countries), free registration, – this seems to be a move to unseat Skype dominance. [Don't ask me about what sort of business plan that is.]

I can just imagine what Sol and the Amigos at Telstra would say if state or local government implemented cheap network systems that included VoIP.

Also, if everyone was doing it, especially using newer, faster, more spectrum-hungry wi-fi technologies, all the networks would be treading over each other and creating havoc for everyone. ‘Course, Cat5 cable is very cheap and abundant …

Regards david

btw some of the newer mobile phones around these days are voip capable. They have wifi built-in. So wherever you are you can look for an open access point first and use that instead of paying mobile rates.

Another interesting thing to try (though can be tricky to setup) is to use Asterisk on a computer as a PBX for your home. That way all of the incoming and outgoing voip and PSTN calls can be handled in one place (eg person specific mail boxes, automatic calculation of least cost routing, filtering of calls based on caller and time of day, telemarketer filtering – put them in voice menu hell!)

I changed my landline to Telstra pre-paid…about $14/month. That handles all my incoming calls, and I retain my original number. I can still make calls, but in general I only use this line to call my local international jump number to use my prepaid international card. That means I only get charged for one local untimed call.
I changed my mobile to Vodaphone (you can use Optus too) prepay, and found that I could make all the calls I needed to for $49/month. I don’t call international as the mobile is still a timed call. You can drag your Telstra number across to the new provider.
So I’m saving over $1500 per year.

One warning about VOIP. Typical Voip uses about 2.5 megs of data every 10 minutes, according to my ISP. If you are on an unlimited plan, you might say it is “free”, but if you do have a limit, be aware that you are chewing into your account when on VOIP, and that is not “free”.

If you’re serious, give this a read. There’s a bit of lifting involved, but it should work fine.

One thing, though: take all of your bandwidth and at least triple them. It would take one, or at the most two, teenage girls to put you right over the limit. :)

Good luck,
David

I also host ssr on my wifi network amongst other things. I dont have any data restrictions – I suspect I would be getting cut off if I tried that with Telstra.

There are a vast number of different and incompatible wireless standards that operate in different parts of the radio spectrum and offer different characteristics such as short range/high bandwidth, long range, penetrates through solid walls, etc etc.

This is one of the barriers to adoption because there isn’t a commonly accepted standard for the whole community to use. The sheer number of competing standards is quite daunting.

The current GSM and CMDA mobile phone networks aren’t suitable because their maximum bandwidth is far too low. Typical data rates are 35kbps for GSM and 120kbps for GPRS.

Even 3G data speeds are nothing special — maxing out at 250kbps for 3G GSM and 700kbps for the next-gen CDMA EV-DO standard in optimum conditions.

Of course, even if these speeds were fantastically fast, the community “mesh” networks aren’t possible using CDMA, GSM or the wireless broadband technologies used by Unwired or iBurst because they are all licensed parts of the spectrum — in other words, you have to pay the provider to access “their” frequency.

802.11/WiFi doesn’t have the same problem with access because these devices operate in an unlicensed part of the spectrum, but the range on these devices is fairly limited and reception will be patchy depending on the solid objects or walls placed between the transmitter and receiver. Additionally, as the number of devices in this portion of the spectrum grow, they will start to interfere with each other and potentially degrade performance. Nonetheless, there are a variety of community wireless projects out there attempting to build this infrastructure.

What would be interesting is if the Government made a portion of the radio spectrum free for anyone to use on the condition that you must accept and re-transmit messages from anyone else sending on that frequency without charge. Don’t know how you could make that work in a legislative sense, but it’s an intriguing idea.

One of the advantages of having others jump on your local Wifi network is narrowcasting possibilities. You can run a radio station through your private network, ARIA need never know, and since it is your private network, Telstra cant hit you for moving data. With some judicious routing you could have other local wifi networks connect to yours too and expand the narrowcast.