Sunday, July 12, 2009

South Mission Beach

We're living in South Mission Beach, Australia for the next five months, and Michele and I and the kids will be writing about our experiences on our "Cassowary Tales" blog. I'll still be posting about non-Australia-related stuff here.

South Mission Beach is a little town on the tropical northeast coast of Australia, between Townsville and Cairns. And, marvel of marvels, they've got town-wide high-speed wireless internet. I believe the Australian government has been subsidizing the infrastructure, but the service isn't free-- $150 Australian dollars (AUD) for the USB modem doo-hickey, and then $100 AUD buys 6 gigabytes of data transfer. Even in South Mission Beach there are two wireless providers, competing against each other to keep prices low and service high. So far, at least, it seems to be working.

The US Stimulus contains billions of dollars for high-speed Internet. If we get a system like they have here in Australia, I won't complain.
Update 27 July: I'm not as happy with wireless internet as I was a week ago; it's kinda flaky. It would be more than fine if we were light Internet users; it's great for email and occasional web surfing, but it's not super reliable. So we're getting wired with DSL this week (which'll end up costing something like $3 per day).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So this means we have one less vote for sanity in Town Meeting in July?

Gavin Andresen said...

Yep, afraid so...