Wireless Broadband Woes……

Posted on January 5th, 2009 by Drazen Drazic

Happy New Year to you all who visit Beast or Buddha. 2009!….gees, 2008 went quick. I suppose everyone is saying that though. I’m still in Townsville and will probably be here until the end of January….a bit of holiday mixed in with a load of work. Securus Global has never been busier.

Optus isn’t making it easy for me though and you really begin to appreciate Internet access speeds in the bigger cities (though far from being world leading in Australia as I’ve mentioned before). I hear from others here that Telstra’s wireless broadband offering is not much better.

I don’t know why or how they can even sell it. It’s not reception that is the killer but rather the load. Most times you get bumped off and at best, you’re working with speeds slower than dial-up. Try loading a web page and you’re in for a 2 minute wait most of the time. The lady at the Optus shop quite openly mentioned; “Yeah…there’s only one tower servicing area X and it can’t cope with the load…pretty much the same everywhere!”. I suppose you’d have to ask; “Why do you keep selling this service up here then?” but you know it’s not going to help much. Given there’s only one other choice and that’s not that good either, what’s their incentive to improve things in the short term?

Big deal?! Not really….actually, I’m more worried about Australia’s slide from the top of the cricket world but that’s another story. Anyway, there’s worse things happening in the world and we’re in a lucky country so we should count our blessings. Normal transmission resumes soon……..