In the leadup to the election, Kevin Rudd announced that 98% of Australians will have access to minimum broadband speeds of 12Mbps. Of course, you're all assuming 12Mbps means "fibre". Most of the talk about "fibre" is hearsay; typically proliferated by IT commentators in the media who don't have a clue. Kevin never actually mentioned fibre. Which opens the door wide open to technologies like Telstra's NextG (which delivers up to 14Mbps in some areas already) and other wireless solutions.
The problem with NextG and wireless is the latency is so terrible, you can't use real-time applications on it, such as Voice or Video over IP. Even things like Google Maps will also run dog slow, because it does a lot of requests on-the-fly.
There's two things you need to consider with "broadband": The bandwidth, and the latency.
Bandwidth (speed) is how fast you can download one single file after the connection has been established (megabits per second). Latency is the round-trip time to the server -- i.e. how long it takes for a request to start coming back to you (milliseconds).
For the sake of comparison:
- Modem: around 300ms
- ADSL: around 20ms
- VDSL: around 10ms
- 3G/NextG/HSDPA: around 500ms
Typical latency on an overseas phonecall to "developing" countries: around 150ms. At 150ms, you can already tell that there is a delay between when you say something and when the other person hears it.
The best example I've heard about the difference between latency and bandwidth is to think of a truck full of DVDs. It has a massive amount of bandwidth, but a latency measured in hours.
It's a shame that the legislators and big telco's are all hung up on the bandwidth of broadband connections. Some attention needs to be paid to the latency too.
The current definition of "broadband" is "an 'always on' Internet connection with an access speed equal to or greater than 256kbps"". Apart from the obvious "256kbps" problem; the definition needs to impose a maximum latency between the subscriber and their ISP of 50ms. After all, the Internet isn't a big truck. It's a series of tubes.