But how long has it been since we saw a widely available increase in Net access bandwidth for the average household?

Okay, we do have ADSL in some areas -- although the coverage is patchy and many people have discovered to their disappointment that their lines simply aren't up to the task.

Rural users, such as the farmers which currently make up the backbone of our economy and export earnings, are well and truly left out in the cold by Telecom and the other major Telcos -- many struggling to get a reliable connection at modem speeds of a decade ago (14.4Kbps).

Readers Say (updated hourly) Prices fall... - Daniel the way of the net... - spiro Have Your Say

Why then, as we try to break our way into the "new economy" and marvel at the enormous glob of bandwidth that the Southern Cross Cable has provided, do we continue to enviously eye our US cousins with their widely available flat-rate high-bandwidth DSL services, comparatively low-cost T1-T3 connections and other options?

Why has the free Internet model crumbled to dust?

Why have Net-access prices not fallen (in fact some have risen) with the arrival of all this surplus bandwidth?

I always thought that prices were pretty much established by the law of supply and demand. If supply increases then it seems natural that prices should fall right?

So why then, if we've just commissioned a cable that boosts our international connectivity by an order of magnitude or more -- have we not see any move in prices?

In fact, the cost of bandwidth remains so high that JetStream retains its per-MB penalty fee for anything over 128Kbps speeds and IHUG have had to alter the charging for their ULTRA service to offset the huge costs incurred by a few users intent on eating all they can.

The composition of Internet content has changed significantly over the past decade. Now, instead of being composed mainly of small files, plain text emails and simple HTML web-pages with a few graphics, the average Net user has access to whole music CDs in MP3 format (at about 40-50MB a pop), websites that include streaming video or huge Flash animations, and far too many emails include bulky word or excel attachments.

What's worse, even if we all had 1mB/S connections to the Net it still probably wouldn't be enough -- because as soon as that much bandwidth was available we'd have people buying (or pirating) movie DVDs over the Net at several Gigabytes a pop.

All this means that the demand for bandwidth is increasing significantly -- perhaps this is why the suppliers of wholesale bandwidth have been able to keep the price up?

Whatever the reasons, it looks as if the holly grail of the Net replacing TV as a source of high quality video or music is stuttering badly.

As user-expectations for Net-based material continue to rise but high costs force us to stay with relatively low bandwidth connections, are we going to find people turning away and going back to watching TV I wonder?

Mind you -- the other night I recorded an hour of prime-time TV and had to edit out almost 50 advertisements! And I used to think banner ads on the Web were annoying...

As always, your feedback is welcomed.

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