Who cares if it takes trendy urbanites an extra 3 minutes to download their latest iTunes purchase?

Leading up to the Australian Federal election, there is a lot of talk in the media and in politics about the need for faster internet access for Australians.

I agree that this is an issue, but the way it is being phrased does the movement a disservice.

ADSL 2 INTERNET ACCESS IN AUSTRALIA IS QUICK - BLOODY QUICK!

We use ADSL 2 from TPG (www.tpg.com.au). It is cheap as chips (about $69.95 per month for the 30 basic Gig package) and for the record, the speed is BLISTERING. We need to be careful that we don’t accidentally download huge files it threatens to fill up our cap of 30 GIGs per month. (Actually we just upgraded to the 50Gig plan because of this very reason).
Our record so far was 1137.89kb per second (i.e. If you had absolutely no taste and wanted to download the entire Pirates of the Carribean 3 (despite being 3 hours long), it would take us about 30 minutes. (Granted, that was from a server based in Melbourne, but we regularly get over 235kbper second from servers based in the US or elsewhere).

PENETRATION STUPID!
What we should really be saying is that we want better broadband penetration. The more people who have access to broadband in Australia (even just old school broadband downloading at 20kb per second) the more Australians will get be involved in online, and the stronger our audience and industry will be.

WHAT’S ALL THIS TALK ABOUT RURAL BROADBAND?
Furthermore, I can appreciate the social aspect of encouraging broadband penetration into rural and remote Australia. Giving all Australians access to internet is important from an economic and education standpoint. However, I wonder how the actual numbers end up breaking down? How much does it cost (or how much do you need to subsidise) a broadband connection to someone in Remote Western Australia?

I don’t really know the exact numbers involved, but if everyone in the major cities already has ADSL (or ADSL 2, or Cable or something else respectable) then surely we should be focussing back towards the areas without broadband at all?