Designed and built by NetComm, the BigPond Elite Wireless Broadband Network Gateway is essentially a 3G modem/router with the same HSPA+ technology used in its mobile broadband sticks. Telstra is touting typical download speeds of up to 8Mbps, although speed tests on servers in Canberra reached 11Mbps.

The device is well suited to people who don’t have a landline, people who don’t have access to ADSL/cable, or people who move frequently, such as travellers or renters. The ideal situation – at least for Telstra – would be to turn the whole house into a Wi-Fi hotspot, thereby feeding the addictions of power-hungry families. There are four Ethernet ports and two USB ports, so you can plug in printers, external hard drives, etc. But that’s not ideal if you want to use the BigPond Elite as a mobile broadband device.

Executive Director Telstra Consumer, Jenny Young: “The Gateway also helps keep families entertained on holidays and while on the move. All that’s required is power and Next G network coverage and parents can quickly and easily access all their online must-haves, from instant messaging and email to YouTube.”

The BigPond Elite is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. Snow Leopard users, however, have to wait for a patch which is expected to roll out on December 1.

It’s available now for $399, and if you sign a 24-month contract, you’re eligible for a $200 rebate and 50 per cent off for the first 12 months. In fact, you have no choice. There is no prepaid option.

Is it worth it to you?

The leaks suggest that countries who sign up to the US-promoted plan would have to force ISPs to proactively police copyright on user-generated content, cut off those accused (or face liability), and put “graduated response” clauses in customer contracts. An example of graduated response is France’s “three strikes and your out” law. There, you get two warnings if caught sharing music or movies, then you’re banned for up to two years.

This provision would mean that every country that signs up to ACTA must allow content owners such as record companies and Hollywood studios to sue ISPs for failing to stop their subscribers from illegally sharing copyright-protected material such as music and movies.

By the way, two major sources of counterfeiting — Russia and China — aren’t in the talks. If you want to get your head further around the issue, these sites do a great job of breaking it all down: [Electronic Frontier Foundation and PC World via BoingBoing]

“uTP measures the time a packet takes to get sent from peer A to peer B, so in theory uTP will detect congestion anywhere on that path, although in practice the congestion most often happens somewhere on the first-mile uplink connection.”

So won’t that affect seeding — the very concept torrenting is based on? What if you’re throttling yourself while everyone else is downloading like mad with a non-uTP client? TorrentFreak says that beta testers haven’t reported any significant issues, and suggests that a more efficient use of the network may actually boost download speeds. uTorrent has a massive user base, and if all those users switched over, maybe that could happen.

If you’re with an ISP who slows you down when you use too much bandwidth, or any provider that slows down when it’s congested, uTP could actually be a very positive thing.

These days, µTorrent is developed by BitTorrent itself, and they’ve been looking to extend an olive branch in the whole net neutrality debate for a while now:

This will have a huge impact on ISP networks according to Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management. “If uTP is successful it should result in a multi-billion dollar windfall in terms of savings for ISPs,” Morris told TorrentFreak

Cool…but I can’t really see this making ISPs who shape torrent traffic suddenly go changing their mind. But I’m all for something being tried, and I’d love to hear your impressions of the beta if you’ve been using it for a while. Detailed background at: [TorrentFreak]

The show transferred a 700MB file using all three methods from Tarana in rural NSW to Prospect in western Sydney, a distance of 130 odd kilometres. It took the pigeon about an hour, the car about two and ADSL… well, let’s just say that Telstra didn’t quite finish the race, although when the process started it was apparently going to take somewhere between four and nine hours.

So while we wait for the NBN, maybe we should invest a bit in pigeon training?

[ABC via ITNews]

When you replace content provider fees with new network backbone company charges, and pay TV packages with traffic or website packages, this doesn’t seem so crazy, does it? [Reddit via Crunchgear]

The Telco has also promised to spend a little bit more time focusing on improving customer service.

There’s no word on how soon we can expect to see these price cuts, or whether they’ll track over to the wholesale internet side of things, but any price cut’s going to be welcome for Telstra customers…

[SMH]

For the three months of the reference period up to June this year, Australians downloaded 99 993 TB of data. Terabytes. Which, according to Google, is equivalent to 102 391 808 gigabytes. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?

What’s more, 75 percent of that came from household connections rather than business connections. Considering the report also says that there are 7,031,000 household internet connections (both dialup and broadband), that equates to just under 11GB per household. Over three months. Which is less than 4GB a month. Which suddenly isn’t that much at all, really.

Also interesting to note is that wireless internet access has jumped from 1.3 million users last December to two million users in June, or a 51% increase over a six month period. And that doesn’t even include mobile phones.

You can check out all the findings yourself over at the ABS wesite.

[ABS – Thanks Eamon!]

This is painful for the vast majority of the world’s online population, who live out their lives in a sub-10Mbps ghetto, but doubly so for South Korea, who seemed to have the claim to the first 1Gbps connection all locked up. If it’s any consolation, nobody’s even claiming they’ll be able to hit 1Gbps here.

Of course, there will be disadvantages. 1Gbps connections surely won’t come cheap, and seriously, beyond extremely well-seeded torrents, you’re going to have trouble finding too many places that are willing to serve you content at over 128 megabytes per second. But still, this hurts. [Broadband TV News]

Apparently many of the ISPs involved in the trial are reporting that there wasn’t really any noticeable slowdown in Internet speeds. But considering the numbers, that’s not really a surprise. After all, if only 15 people were to attend an event at the MCG, getting out at the end of the match would be super-fast.

ARN also quoted some statistics experts who essentially say that the results are complete BS in the eyes of science. The downside is that the government is likely to twist the results to reflect the positive aspects of the trial, and neglect the fact that there weren’t actually any large numbers of people involved.

As always, keep voicing your displeasure at this intrinsically flawed Government plan to fuck up the internet.

[ARN]

However, as Gus over at Lifehacker points out, that 30GB counts both uploads and downloads. Which sucks. Although realistically, the types of people who go for this aren’t going to really use up all that data anyway. Especially when you consider that TiVo and iView downloads are still unmetered, just like all Internode plans.

[Internode and Lifehacker]