brad

Current overseas bandwidth from Australia is appalling. While I reliably achieve 7-8 Mbps within Australia from my Transact connection, this falls to less than 2 Mbps as soon as I want to access sites in the US or Europe. This sluggish performance makes it unbearable to watch streaming video, for example.

It would appear that someone is strangling our connection to the outside world. This problem does not seem to arise with aarnet performance (I once watched an HD videoconference between AIMS and San Diego which maintained a speed of roughly 100 Mpbs) so I'm inclined to blame Telstra. Actually, I blame the privatisation of the infrastructure owned by Telstra.

Finally, the proposal for compulsory filtering of internet content is a purely political ploy without any basis in quantitative fact. It's being driven by the populist misconception about youth victimisation that was thoroughly debunked in US Congressional hearings. I recommend the reader to access the podcast of the US Congress hearing "Just the facts about online youth victimization" for an objective presentation of the facts by experts in the field. The last people to suffer from such ill-advised policies as compulsory filtering are the people doing the bad things. They already know how to defeat such tactics as are being proposed. It's all the law-abiding users who suffer.