Friday 6 April 2012

only 54% of Australian homes have wifi

I tweeted a link to a report from the Register to the effect that 54% of Australian homes have wifi compared to around 74% in the UK. At the same time another survey claims that less than a third of 'smart' tv owners have plugged their tv's into their home network.

The real question is why so low - almost everyone seems to have a laptop or a tablet so you would tend to expect that they would have ADSL and a wifi router at home - or is it because a reasonably large number of people use 3G in preference over the sometimes erratic and pathetic fixed infrastructure that is Telstra's copper network.

Certainly 3G is a revelation - I recently purchased a Virgin broadband key and 4GB of data to free me from the perils overpriced hotel wifi and the service is  as fast and reliable as hotel wifi and at 4GB with 30 day expiry and a 'free' key (usb modem) for $25. Recharges are similarly priced.

At home we use around 8 or 9GB of data a month - we're not big downloaders on the whole,  and the service can't cope reliably with streaming media.

Given what we pay for our service, buying the equivalent amount of data from Virgin would be cheaper, except that of course we need wifi for the tablets, the kindle, fixed ethernet for the laser printer and the internet radio and sometimes we want to run multiple devices at once, but in a house hold of one (which is of course a growing trend getting you internet over 3G would see worthwhile and cost effective ... 

No comments: