I had one of those ‘gotcha’ moments today.
I’m in the process of moving and, despite my best efforts, find myself in a broadband ‘dead zone’. Not in the sense that I moved to the boondocks, but due to the time it is taking my provider (iiNet) to commission an ADSL2+ service at my new place.
So this week I find myself sitting in my office surrounded by packing boxes and limping along on my standby 1Gb 3G wireless service (via Three, connected @ 7.2Mbps). Normally I only use this when I find myself travelling and staying at hotels with outrageous broadband charges. Now I am trying to run a business and maintain a connection with the outside world.
And you know what…it is ridiculously difficult to get by on a 1Gb plan over a painfully slow wireless connection.
But that’s not the point of this post. My point is that for all the frustration this situation is causing me, I still have *greater* connectivity that most Australians.
That’s right…the majority of Australian households use Telstra’s cheapest broadband plans, with 200Mb per month quotas and barely-better-than-dialup speeds.
Which brings me to that ‘gotcha’ moment I experienced earlier today: how does this ‘connectivity lag’ impact your business and technology plans, and how will it impact your growth in the local market? If the average Australian household has ‘fraudband’, and your product/service assumes high connectivity, how does this shape your ability to serve the local market? How could you reshape your offering to target a broader section of the local market (at least until the connectivity lag reduces)?
Food for thought.
Hey There,
I’m an Aussie and I can tell you this much, I’m well aware of the discrepancies between BB services here & those in the US and it’s a point that is brought even closer to home when visiting flash sites which we still more commonly see come out of the US than here in Aus. I’m on an ADSL2 service which is considered pretty quick and deals with most regular sites well. However when jumping onto a site using flash it can take so long to load that I just bail as I simply don’t have the patience to wait, behaviour which is typical of an online environment. Certainly something for internet based business’ to be considering if they’re wanting to sell here! LOL I’ve always kinda taken my BB access for granted as I have a service provided through my employer as I work from home, but I came across a business just down the road from me recently that still had a 64kbps dial up connection. He tried to download some product information for me from a website and I had to wait for nearly 15 mins for him to navigate to the site, find the right info and then print it off. I was ready to say just give me the link and I will go look it up myself but I think he was embarassed enough as it was… Admittedly dial-up is pretty rare these days unless ur in the boonies but ur average BB connection is about 256kbps and if you’re lucky up to 512kbps/256kbps… bring on fibre optic… LOL