Enough with the sneaker net already!

I don't really know where I was going with this link but I thought it about time that I mentioned where I felt communications were up to in Australia. I have this feeling that so much of our effort of day to day life is working an elaborate sneaker net of information. All too often it isn't enough to send a picture, sound or video, and one must bring the object to the person or vice versa, just as in the old days we needed to save something to disk to move it to another computer. The more everything gets connected, the less this has to happen, although I think that shirts that can be screen printed by remote are a long way away yet.

There appears to be a fierce level of competition between carriers in the mobile Internet arena, and a bit of a lack of service in the adsl+ department. The NBN seems to have progressed to a level where even a sudden change of Government would find it hard to reverse the general gist of the new structure being formed in the industry. I believe that not only the current wireless competitive environment, but the future fixed broadband environment will also be fiercely competitive. The main scope for future differentiation between brands will be overall service, how plans will combine with other related comms, and total monthly data plans as before. Speed will be even less of an issue than it is now. There is virtually no chance that either the NBN co. will struggle to make ends meet, nor that the investment made by taxpayers will cause Australia to approach European US or Japanese levels of public debt levels.