Electronic Gaming Monthly is reporting in their latest print issue that Doom3 might be released for Xbox first followed by a later release for the PC and that Microsoft is trying to get exclusive Xbox rights for Quake 4.

News on this is in short supply, but no doubt news will surface during the E3 Expo, which is scheduled for Los Angeles, 21st-24th May 2002

Source: Warp2search

The commercial dream of broadband is taking longer than it should simply because of the telcos and thier ability to provide a bit enough infastructure.

The best gaming experience is still lan.

Yes BB is dead, i don't think it was ever alive, when did you ever see anyone providing a complete video of something other than sport, i have never seen a movie/tv show using BB that wasn't either downloaded from IRC or it was p0rn, BB is not all its made up to be, yes its faster and no dialing up and s***, but it is not worth the money really, and now that Tel$tra / Bigswamp / Duckpond have introduced the 3 gig limit, even if there was BB content to view we wouldn't be able to watch it anyway casue it would count towards our measily 3 gigs which could be reached in less than 24hrs.

GTFREAK

"...is Broadband Internet really dead? "

Last I checked, yes. As far as Tel$tra is concerned, if it isn't dead already they are doing their best to put it out of its misery with a 3gb cap and a s***house network.

I've been on the net since mid 93 (that's pre 'www'). Here's how i see it:

On dialup, it use to take an hour to download a warez game (say, 3-5 1.44 meg zips), it now takes around an hour to download a warez game.

On dialup, it use to take just a few seconds for the lynx/gopher page to display. It now takes just a few seconds for the web page to display.

On dialup, when wireplay first came out (direct dial), we got pretty damn close to 100ms pings. We now get pretty damn close to 100ms pings.

On dialup we use to spend days idling away on irc. we now spend days idling away on irc.

On dialup we use to spend hours of the day responding to news group posts about bulls***. We now spend hours of the day responding to forum post about bulls***.

On dialup we use to spend hours at a time surfing the net hoarding porn. We now spend hours at a time surfing the net hoarding porn.

Nothing's really changed. The connections faster but the data we are chasing is heavy, or the effective activity hasn't changed at all (dialup porn was jpg, broadband porn is mpg - irc is and always will be irc)

Yeah AcidReign is completely correct.
That article was the single biggest load if s*** I have ever read. Obviously it was written by someone 'claiming' to have substantial knowledge of both computers and the internet, but really has been completely mis-informed. You can't stream Cd quality music with a dial up connection. You can't watch movie previews in real-time at Apple.com with a dial up connection. You can't play online games competitively with a dial-up connection... the article really could not have been more incorrect. Telstra are %90 to blame for Australia not seeing VOD and other interesting sorts of things that need a bradband connection. 3 GIG simply is just not enough to make their service a practical solution.

Broadband has no phone line related costs, and it provides a permanent connection (again, I'd hardly call Telstra's unreliable version of broadband a permanent connection). Broadband also provides super fast downloads and quick ping times.
The list goes on.
Broadband provides the user with the ability to participate in video conferencing and voice chat. Again, this is not possible on a dial up connection.
Optus is almost a total bradband solution, and the Netstats restraining device works extremely well - I've yet to see my ping raise no matter what time of day, or notice a substantial drop in KB/s while downloading. The fact that Optus's broadband service runs exceptionly well without and form of hard restraint basically proves that there really is no need to impose a ludicrous speed and MB cap such as Telstra has done.

i thinks the title should be "Telstra Broadband is dead"

its not "dead" its the "dead" s***s that run it.

these ppl don't have cable do they...?

Broadband has no phone line related costs...

Yes it does. I have ADSL and when I tried to get it installed they made me get a land line connected to my flat first and force me to pay a monthly line rental. According to my last bill for that number I make an average of 2 voice calls a month, and the only calls i receive on it are tele-marketing.

eeek, telemarketing! the spam of the phone system!

Tel$tra has basically f***ed BB in Australia, and as far as I've seen, they're doing it on purpose!

Wasn't there something about a new ADSL company laying s***loads of cable around oz? Could someone post the link plz.

umm, i do recall hearing about some wireless network thing going on in queensland, did anyone actually get that? wots it current status???

Status: too f***ing expensive

yeah, cable is soooooo not worth the money you fukn fork out for it!

---

Cable costs the same as dial up for me.
That MAN thing was about $700 for the card alone, then there was the antenna rig

if optus became available in more places telstra would surely lose customers. 60kb/sec is pretty sad when the average game demo is now between 70-150mb. takes longer than it should and could download. the idea of bb was to avoid that waiting time among other things.

i enquired at the time optus announced its bb plans as to when i would be able to get optus cable. they said "sometime in august" at the time that meant i *had* to get bpa for 6 months before optus was in my street. the really annoying part is that it was august last year they were supposed have it here....it still isnt in my street =/ the bastards

wait on

that was august the year before now i think about it

dont get old you stop remebering stuff

lol..sad mofo..


AS A CONCLUSION..
WE ALL AGREEE BPA SUX BIG TIME and BB around Oz IS DEAD..


someone send all the above post to BPA telling them how much they suck...


Y
:D :D :D

I blaim everything bad about cable internet on telstra.

aawis

amen to that.

for me broadband in australia is LONG dead. by caping speed and download limit, the word broadband in suatralia meaning, just a permanet connection, cost around 2 - 5 times more than dial up. they create broadband to able people to watch movies, streaming etc. but according to australia broadband provider NOWAY. broadband is a way to make "US" (broadband comany specially "TEL$TRA") getting ritcher faster.

my definition of broadband is having a T1 to my house, and costing about the same as my monthly mobile bill (80-120 dorrah)

my optus rawks....i love having a broadband connection

I really expected something truely amazing.

Damnit - I fell for yet another shameless sales pitch.

Well I would agree that optus and telstra suck dick, but just saying broadband is dead is stupid. I can get movies faster than I can watch them (naturally all legal stuff), I remember this one 4 cd game (shareware) that I got in about an hour and a half...

Obviously this fool writing the article has never had a good service for broadband...

He/she should really be writing about how telstra and optus suck, and optus does suck, I mean 10 gigs? jesus christ...

Now if you want to know whats dead its my BURNER :( had it for 4 years, and it died just the other day, it just couldnt hold out until I got a double sided double layered dvd burner, well I must say it did a courageous job for an unbranded cheap peice of s***.

Are all u ppl saying that broadband is dead using te|$tra? Hehehe Optus is everything I could ask the internet to be :D :D

well... I for one would like video to stream at a decent res, at decent sound quality, uninterupted.

ie... I love watching German MTV, but f***ed if it ever streams smoothly @ the xdsl/512k cable setting. I have to settle for the 56k stream - and even then it's choppy at times.

Don't get me wrong - I love my Optus hookup. I expected better though. Gawd only knows what Telstra Bigpuddle Cable customers have put up with for all these years

=/

I WANT 100MBPS ZERO PACKETLOSS FULL CONNECTIVITY WITH MULTIPLE IP ADDRESSES TO MY LOUNGEROOM FOR $20 A MONTH CAUSE I THINK THAT'S WHAT IT SHOULD COST MAEN!!!

Aus broadband is Sooooooooo worth it.

DSL etc in the USA costs $40 (Aus $80, same as what I'm paying now) and you're lucky if your DSL provider doesn't go belly up.
Just because they give you max line rate (and sometimes use full rate instead of G.lite, ie 8mbits instead of 1.5mbits/sec max) doesn't mean that their quality of service doesn't disappear down during busy times. At least Telstra is trying to provide a decent quality of service by restricting bandwidth to an available level.
Try getting ISDN, DDS or any other faster-than-PSTN-modem service here- then see how much those services cost. (Yes, you can partly lay blame to Telstra monopolistic pricing practices there...)

Pay Optus about $100 per month and get a phoneline (with some free calls) and cable TV included.. you can hardly go wrong at that price.

Yes, I realise that Telstra still have problems. I'm rather annoyed at another hour-long outage at around 6pm tonight, and sometimes there is still congestion.

But, I saw Telstra offer a high quality streaming broadcast of the Big Day Out a couple of years ago via cable (using multicast I think, streaming like 1Mbit/s to thousands of users.) That is fulfilling the potential of broadband. Pity they don't do it more.

You've all just gotten used to the broadband idea, that's why you're not amazed. You just take it for granted that you can now download a full Linux ISO in a couple of hours - instead of barely getting the base floppies in that time. You just take it for granted that you could do so and still get a half decent ping in your favourite FPS at the same time. The fact that you could watch 2 streams of big brother at once whilst still surfing the web is proof that it's here.

Now all we have to do is support the ISPs and ACCC in their efforts to get the CAN (phonelines) opened up by Telstra for other providers to use, which might encourage Telstra in turn to provide a better service.

Dead? Well, I guess that what everyone was lead to believe broad band would be is dead in the same way that space exploration is dead cause we aint livin on the moon. Like commercialism does to everything, the broadband internet notion was hyped up to be what the technology may be capable of. And yea, it sure was capable of a hell of a lot. Everyone's just pissed off cause we're getting what's practicle, and financially proffitable and not what's theoretically possible. It's just crap that in Australia we're lacking the competition in this market that would usually drive the service providers to start providing better service or loose customers. Yea telstra sucks and is holdin out on what they got... but with such a monopoly on the communications network a lot of people are stuck with the dial up or BPA choice.

i agree with GrrrRich here... just because telstra have put limits on their broadband doesn't mean it is crap... i mean, i dare you bb people to go back to dialup, then try streaming some audio or video, then you will realise how good bb really is.
i am on dialup still, and anyway, after we work out line rental, call charges and isp charges in my house, that adds up to well over $115 so $80/month for internet is pretty good considering the speed you get for the price.

Ringo : I really think that attitude is disgusting.

This is because Telstra said "you'll get 3 gigs and like it", and now you do.

It's like the Government saying, well we are going back to despotism, and you sitting there saying, well the beaches in this country are still nice.

I know im being an a****** but thats just how I feel.

Well here in canberra, i'm hoping atleast, that BB will live upto my expections. TransACT are installing Optical Fibre lines to every house in canberra. Even thought they are caping the download speeds (256/68Kbits, 512/68Kbits, 1Mbit/256Kbits, 2Mbits/512Kbits [and there hopeing on making an uncapped one] ) 200k is very good, hell 25k is good compared to my downloading of Wolfenstein Multiplayer Test which will take 6 hours at 3.5k. And we have a great ISP here called Netspeed. They sponser LAN's and supply hubs & servers. And are working on an unlim download plan. Aswell as putting up servers here in canberra, which have been tested and get 10ms from TransACT users.

And unlike tel$tra BB, we will never get conjusted, I mean how can 30house downloading on a 30gb per second line get congisted ?
We are also getting cable TV + HD and VOD to our TV's & computers.

If plans like TransACT are rolled out all over Oz we may just see BB living upto everyones expections.

dude - I was down there sussing out your local hookup a few weeks back (love how yer less than 3hrs from the snow btw :)

is fibre-optic to your door *ever* going to become a reality, or is it going to be vdsl for some time?

btw - where do you lan?

my lil bro is still looking for a local Ausgamers (Canberra)lan...

lol

Australia is not a good market to make money from broadband.

Optus/Telstra pay upstream carriers around 5 cents per megabyte.

Carriers are faced with the fact that Australia is a small sparsely populated market.

Obviously because people want to be doing a lot of streaming and downloading they expect the world from their broadband service for only a small amount of money, this is not completely viable for carriers that also provide support and infrastructure.

Optus have done a lot of market analysis to find out the level of the pricing structure just to maybe get them over break even. Although i have heard of them being on the brink of bankruptcy (Thats why they aint rolling out lots of sites anymore).

Telstra is playing it safe and even though they make a few billion dollars profit a year, they know that broadband in Australia is not wise to invest in.

Its all about money people!

Optus/Telstra pay upstream carriers around 5 cents per megabyte.

So your saying if I upload 3 gigs and do nothing else its costing them 150 dollars (at least)? Im not even going to give you my opinion on that because I am convinced either I or you have made a mistake, and seeing as I can multiply .05 by 3000...

Its not as though they have to maintain a fleet of tankers moving packets across the sea...

Telstra is playing it safe and even though they make a few billion dollars profit a year, they know that broadband in Australia is not wise to invest in.

Telstra seem to know very little, they are alienating their customers, they are f***ing up rather badly, it really has gotten to the point where I would never sign a contract with them that I couldnt get out of easily.

Errr???

I said Telstra/Optus.. not users.. get it right m0f0!

Every ISP buys bandwidth off each other.

They actually do contract tankers to carry fibre cable to distribute it on the ocean bed.

Dont underestimate Telstra. They tried to get aggresive and compete with Optus but they saw the light and are backing out. Not a wise business decision (publicly anyway) but i mean they arent stupid. They have their reasons.

I would disagree. Broadband may be limited in its area of availability, but it still allows a LOT of things you wouldnt be able to do on dialup. Ok, maybe not DSL, but from what ive been hearing the new docsis BPA ppl are having a fairly good time of it in terms of speeds and pings, and who downloads more than 3 gb a months on dialup??

Of course, this is all from the lofty POV of someone on optus, and i regularly download 3gb on a weekend. May have something to do with why i ended up getting cut off for 2 weeks for having a ns of 10.9 :) still, s'all good, my cable is back again, and my netstats are up to 4.6 after getting cable back on friday evening, and I was at mpu all of saturday :) (btw, your netstats reset to 0 when you get suspended! :) )

Its limited because its just about dead. Most of you are missing the point.

Of course its going to give you something better than just a regular dial up, its bloody cable!
But how long do you think it will last for?

Optus was bought by Singtel not long ago, they can easly just decide not to invest in something that is at the moment a liability. As a matter of fact, the whole ISP sector is a liability. Nobody can make any decent money out of providing bandwidth because the market is saturated with competition.

The only thing thats probably keeping them alive is their huge server farms of cache servers that is filled with all the shareware(warez)/mp3/pr0n that you guys regularly get :)

Meanwhile i still get 10gb of downloads with iprimus dial up every month and i have no real need for a bigger pipe.

That article seemed to be more about the writer's misconception of what internet content is available rather than any problems with actual bandwidth. I guess gamers just like to complain about bandwidth. I remember about 10 years ago people were talking about the internat replacing telephones , TV & basically all communications & electronic entertainment. It is sorta getting there ... slowly but surely ... I just think people realised that you'd acctually have to pay for it all ! :o)

As this thread seems to have taken a turn into complaining about broadband bandwidth , pricing & whotevah ... It is cheaper for me to have cable with BPA than it was to have a dialup connect. I was paying around $70/month in Extra phone line rental , ISP charges , phone call , etc ... with cable it is $67/month. I still think the actual service & performance of BPA is s*** though. Yes , it is better than the dial-up , however that is to be expected. Long unscheduled outages & poor helpdesk service are the killer for me.

The Article aside, my main beef about Bigpond is the people that were abusing the network, I'm talking about some of the heavy warez kiddies out there, I'm not talking about the 25GB, I'm talking over that. 30GB and above. I don't know or have not come to an understanding why Telstra did _not_ kick these people for abusing the network and service month after month.

As a current BPA customer I have 2 extra accounts ( @ $10 a month), mainly for the extra e-mail and have to keep my downloading to a minimum because I have 2 more people (thats rough;y 33 MBs a day per user), thats why I'm so pissed @ telstra not kicking the people but just leting them leech.

Was there a loop hole in the contract ? Becasue I read somewhere that if you were abusing the network you would get kicked. But I ain;t seen that happen.

Food for thought. :P

The bottom line is this: If money isn't being made - they pull the plug.

None of this negative sector gearing s*** either.
If Telstra or O@H were not making a SUBSTANTIAL profit out of providing broadband they wouldn't be doing it.
It is not uncommon though to scream poverty as to keep certain people from pressuring them.

dead is still a stupid word to use though, sure the progess has slowed down and all dreams may be short of realised but the service is still a major step up from dialup.

if there was 10 times the fibre layed around the world we could do this kind of stuff .. but you gotta remember it takes alot longer and costs alot more to lay that cable than it takes for new tech to be developed that would need to use more of it.
Couple that with the increasing amount of people becoming interested and getting online and wanting it for cheap and its pretty obvious why we arent there yet.

I reckon O@H cable is worth the money..

Responding to Mofo

\"Tel$tra has basically f***ed BB in Australia, and as far as I\'ve seen, they\'re doing it on purpose!\"

Simon Hackett of Internode posted in the Whirlpool forums on this subject

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=-5675410

In a nutshell, Tel$tra is making money providing ISDN leased line type services, so they\'re not terribly interested in providing a cheaper alternative. To business or home consumers. Bastards

Sounds like the writer is just pissed off that its not what he thought it would be... I think if every internet user had broadband then it prolly would be... being a web developer you have to take into account that the average user has a s***y computer and average of a 56k connection.. Would be nice if everyone that used the internet had broadband and beasty comp.. then we could make the web a more exciting place.. as it stands thats just a dream :)

lol..the web is exciting as it is

I think it depends on what you're comparing it to. Compare it to some overseas connections, it's nothing. Compare it to Australian dialup, it's 'special.'

Broadband isn't dead, its the telecommunications companys enthusium to supply every person with there brilliant high speed internet and the cabling to support. Broadband has come to a stand still, even ADSL has slowed down (installation wise) because of there cheap ways of cabling certain news ares to provide everyone with telephone connections and not the internet connections that you might be looking for. If only they got there act together with Austalias boradband services instead of offering these
poor options to broadband.