Broadband

You might have heard of something called the NBN which stands for the National Broadband Network.

The government plans to spend 43 billion dollars building it but some people are asking if it's worth it.

So what's so special about broadband anyway?

Well Kirsty logged on to crack the broadband code.

And she found that not all internet connections are created equal.

KIRSTY BENNETT, REPORTER: It's a sound you might not hear that much anymore. It's dial up internet and it started getting popular in homes in the 90s. It was groundbreaking because for the first time you could dial into the internet from your home computer. But it was also slow and you couldn't really do much more than send a bit of text around.

MOTHER: Get off the internet so I can use the phone.

KIRSTY: It was OK to use back then because all we wanted to do was send an email or surf the net for a short time. People weren't downloading songs and things like Facebook and YouTube didn't even exist! But over the years, we began to ask a lot more from our computers and dial up just couldn't handle it. That's when broadband stepped in to speed things up.

Broadband is a high speed internet connection that can carry voice, video and information to the computer all at once. It's kind of like a highway with lots of lanes that are used to download and upload data and it makes dial up look so yesterday.

The speeds you get on dial up can't handle loads of data like you would need for streaming video. So it might look something like this. But broadband connections deliver information a lot faster so you would be able to watch me without any interruptions. Even in high definition.

To give you an idea, let's download a movie. If you were to do that on dial up it would take about a day! On a type of broadband called ADSL1, which runs at 1.5 megabits per second, it would take around 90 minutes. On a faster broadband called ADSL2+ it would take about 15 minutes. On a cable connection it could take five minutes. But the government's planned broadband is expected to shake up these download times. It expects the new system will run at 100 megabits per second, so that movie would appear within a minute! All those speeds sound pretty zippy but compared to the rest of the world Australia is falling behind.

Australia relies on an old communications network made out of copper wires. Some of it was laid over 100 years ago. ADSL broadband runs on this network. But some households, especially those in rural areas, can't get it because they're too far away from a telephone exchange where the main connection equipment is. So the government wants to put in fibre optic cables so the internet data can get all the way to your house. Fibre optic cables are made up of super thin strands of glass that carry light signals. It's quicker than a copper cable, can digest more data and the connection can travel much further down the line.

It all sounds pretty rosy but there are some households that still won't be able to connect to the new system. So the government will offer them other options like satellite and wireless which can sometimes be slower. The rollout of the new network is planned to take the next eight years. So if this is what we can do with computers now, just imagine what we'll be able to do once Australia's Internet gets more zoom.

(*amended 16/11/10)

Australia