Big pipe means big download speed

FOR anyone with better things to do than swot up on megabits and the latest geeky acronyms, it's best to think of Labor's broadband plan as a new, bigger pipe.

The internet is a huge vat of data, overflowing with YouTube videos, BitTorrent movies, TV show downloads, music and games. The size of the pipe between you and the internet determines whether you can take a bath in all that enticing content, or tap your feet as it dribbles on to your PC.

Much of what is currently marketed as "broadband" doesn't cut it. At 512 kilobits per second, watching much of the video content on the web requires regular pauses while the "buffer" fills with data.

Online games central to next generation consoles such as the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are hampered by jumpy gameplay. Innovative online virtual reality worlds such as Second Life, or breakthrough applications such as Google Earth, dawdle and frustrate, rather than fascinate.

And future applications such as IPTV — television over your internet pipe — are flat-out impossible.

We're lagging while others are sprinting ahead. A recent report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia placed us 25th on a global ladder of average download speeds.

So how do you get a bigger pipe? The speed of broadband is related to the distance from your computer to the fat internet connection at the local telephone exchange. If some of the equipment moves from the exchange to a "node" closer to the home, and those nodes are hooked to an ultra-fast optical fibre network, you get a massive speed boost. Fast forward to 12 megabits per second, the proposed "floor" to the new plan, and you're in a totally different internet.

The latest YouTube video plays as soon as you click the play button. iTunes albums are in your library before you've finished unwinding the earbud cord from your iPod. And companies such as Telstra will soon be knocking on your door with video-on-demand: TV shows available for instant display on your PC or plasma screen.

But that's just the beginning. After fibre-to-the-node comes fibre-to-the-home, already a reality in parts of Japan and South Korea. And that's a different experience again.

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