Or is already. In the Lismore area we’ve been experiencing a massive drop in the speed of the net over the last two months. We experience all the signs of our connections being monitored but not filtered, yet. I’m a webmaster and my clients have been complaining about the recent low broadband speeds, mostly thinking it was an issue with their computer. Many times, I’ve not been able to update/upload websites because connections take to long and are phased out. Checking websites has become a slow, painful and expensive process. I now get more and more enquiries over the phone. When I ask the caller if they have visited my website because all the info is there. The usual answer is negative, because they cannot be bothered,to slow. A local teacher conference was hampered because the connection conked out all the time. A local nurse, subscribed to an online course costing a few thousand dollars eventually gave up in frustration and compared doing the course on line to visiting a dentist. And what seemed impossible a while ago here’s the future: My son’s laptop broke and he told me not to bother with a replacement.

Holy crap, mel.

Is this slow performance similar across all ISPs? Not all ISPs are (known to be) participating in trials. It could well be that the big pipe from the local ISPs to the outside world might be overloaded.

I’m just thinking about how you’d go about divining if there’s a filter running. http filtering wouldn’t affect ping times, so you could ask subscribers to check the ping times to certain websites on various local ISPs then compare the http response times. If some ISPs are markedly slower on http response, you might reasonably conclude that those ISPs might be filtering.

A kid who doesn’t want a new laptop really is saying something…

Gee Weez,
I dearly hope its just an overloaded pipe, but it does not fit the recent exchange upgrades. Once the gov is going to squeez the whole show through a filter, the internet in this area will have been a short lived gizmo only used by desperate people with nerves of steel. Streaming video or internet radio (with my beloved blues stations) are already something of the past.

Wow, not even streaming audio? That usually doesn’t run more than about 32KB/s. That’s no good. If I couldn’t get 32KB/s I’d be spewin’.

I’m on an Optus ADSL 1.5Mb/256kb and reliably get 157KB/s down. We’re less than 500m from the CO. Optus is participating in the censorship trial, but we’re not part of it. I’d certainly have noticed if we were being filtered.

At least two boxes on my network can stream ABC iView or YouTube simultaneously without stuttering & rebuffering. The other two machines can be web browsing, but they’re pretty slow if the other machines are streaming video. No fancy network gear, just a D-Link 4 port ADSL router, 10/100 ethernet ties it all up.

Bring on the effin’ fibre!