During the time that I’ve been in Sydney I have experienced a variable and unstable internet. I know it’s not the hardware that I’m using because it is an iPhone 12, and the school laptop is an HP Elitebook that is only 24 months old. I have just completed a Zoom call (as this is the first day of school and I wanted to welcome all the kids back) and it was very poor quality. I fell off at one point and we needed to restart. This was awful compared to what we are all used to in New Zealand, especially if you are able to take advantage of fibre and ultrafast speeds, so I decided to do multiple speedtests on both the laptop (using the apartment’s Wi-Fi) and on my phone (using 4G). The results were almost identical:
The first is from the laptop…
…and the second is from my phone.
It is fair to say that I am grateful for the vision that our consecutive governments have used regarding the investments in the infrastructure. In NZ we are paying for very impressive speeds of 100+ mbps at a monthly rate that is cheaper than the Australians are paying, and they are getting less than 10 mbps (and this is after the Australians have just completed their upgrades!).
Now that we have become reliant on the internet for all our media i.e. TV, gaming, music, social media etc. we are taking for granted what we have access to, however we should be thankful because we have one of the best services in the world. Remember this next time you’re waiting less than 8 seconds for Netflix or Disney+ to load…
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