Suddenly, for less than $100, you could get 200GB of data per month, from Telstra. Competing ISPs weren’t happy, not the least because some of these prices were cheaper than they were selling wholesale to other ISPs. Many of them rely on using Telstra’s wholesale services in bulk to make their money, and if consumer rates are cheaper than wholesale rates they can’t do that.

While that plays out in the legal sphere, the other ISPs haven’t been sitting still. A week after Telstra dropped its pricing bombshell, Internode answered with plans offering 240GB.  A week later iiNet announced plans with a total of 1TB (1,000GB) per month download plans. Within hours, Primus was offering 1.1TB plans, and TPG now offers a 1TB plan as well.

Storage is cheaper than it’s ever been, but it’s a fair guess that many readers won’t have that much storage space in their entire PC. So, if relatively few users have 1Tb per month to spare, is there actually value in these plans?

To an extent – and it’s even a legal extent –  yes, there can be. The ISPs in question aren’t banking on every user on a 1TB plan using the whole 1TB per month. Like many services, they figure most users won’t go through that much, but they’ll get the money either way.

What 1TB does buy you is a fair amount of security in terms of getting shaped. You could download a month’s worth of legal download movies (from, say, iTunes) and still be within your cap. Stream an awful lot of video from those services that the given ISPs don’t already allow under the cap, catching up on as much free-to-air TV as you like.  Obviously there’s a market of people who will never need 1TB, but if you’re sitting on a plan where you consistently get shaped for the last couple of months of your plan, and it’s close to the typical $99 price point that many of these plans go for, there’s a strong argument to say that you could be doing better.

The latest surveyed figures, however tell a different story, at least from looking at the  market research figures that research company GfK released for the second quarter of 2010 in mid-August. In tech terms, it’s a gloomy picture compared to twelve months ago. Admittedly, twelve months prior government stimulus money was theoretically flowing through the economy, but still, that idea that IT is somewhat recession proof didn’t stop a lot of categories going backwards. We’re spending less on notebooks (down 3%), photography (down 6.8%) and consumer electronics (TVs, audio, camcorders, GPS) generally (down 8.3%).

Where we are apparently spending up big is just as interesting. Smartphones sales are way up — 92% year on year. That tallies with what I’ve been told by Telstra, who indicated to me that some 25% of their mobile customers were using smartphones at the end of the financial year, and they expect that to hit 50% by year’s end. Having witnessed the frankly baffling crowds hustling to get hold of an iPhone 4 at the Sydney launch — where simply walking to the end of the Optus queue from front to back was a brisk four minute affair — that’s not too surprising.

The genuinely surprising category to me was in storage. Unit sales were up 62%, although that’s at least due in part to decreased actual prices for things like hard drives and external flash drives; that 62% volume increase only led to a 23% value increase. Whether that means we’re all still continuing to just create more and more data, or the lessons about backups are getting through (you do backup your precious files, don’t you?) is impossible to say.

Late last week, Google announced that it’s pulling the plug on one of its most hyped but least successful products, Google Wave (www.google.com/wave). Wave was touted as a collaborative tool that could replace instant messaging, Wikis, social networking and email within one web-based interface. Initially only available to users by invitation, Google did a great job developing hype for the product by limiting availability, but even when Wave was opened to the general public, it failed to catch on as well as Google might have hoped. The learning curve was a little steep, and it was a product — like many social networks — that really relied on having a critical mass of users to be genuinely useful.

For those who like a little home grown feeling with their technology, it’s worth noting that Wave was developed and maintained in Sydney, and in these uncertain economic times it’s nice to note that Google’s stated that none of the developers will be laid off; instead they’ll be reassigned according to this ITNews report: http://itnews.com.au/News/223654,sydney-staff-survive-googles-wave-cutback.aspx

Wave’s closure — which will happen by the end of the year — doesn’t mean that collaborative software in itself is dead. There’s plenty of other products — Microsoft’s SharePoint being the most prominent — and it’s not as though one product will sink Google.

It’s arguably a similar kind of situation that existed with mobile phones around fifteen years ago. Mobiles themselves were still pretty clunky creatures, and plenty of folk could rather easily say that they had no use for a phone that was always on them. In today’s connected world, there are few that would make that claim. A smartphone just takes that to the next level, matching up your email and other functions to your location no matter where you are. We’re even starting to see some reasonably priced data plans to go with smartphones, taking the bill shock problem out of the equation.

We’re also seeing a lot more variance in what smart phones look like. For the past couple of years, most manufacturers have made smartphone that, for better or worse, aped the simple style of Apple’s iPhone lines. iPhones have been popular, so it made a certain amount of sense to do so. Still, there are those who don’t want a touchscreen-only phone, or don’t want an Apple phone full stop.

I went to a preview — not quite a launch, as it’s not quite clear as to what the company involved will actually sell in the Australian marketplace — of a number of new technology products from Chinese company Huawei recently. You’ve most likely never heard of Huawei, although the chances are decent you may have interacted with some of the company’s technology in one way or the other. As an example, outside of Telstra, all the USB modems currently offered for mobile broadband by Australia’s telecommunications companies are Huawei modems.

One of the potential products that Huawei executives showed off to me were a range of Android phones. There were, predictably, phones that carried that standard “iPhone” style big-screen experience, for those that want it. There was a Google-branded phone that we may see by the end of the year, similar to the HTC Desire but a fair bit smaller, and potentially a bit cheaper. Also in attendance was an oddly small Android phone, the U8300 that featured a tiny physical keyboard. From a very brief test of the phone, it’s not going to challenge a Blackberry for keyboard dominance, but if you wanted a cheap smartphone with a keyboard, it might be worth considering.

There’s no clear indication that any of these phones will come to the Australian marketplace, and even if they do they’re highly unlikely to be directly labelled as Huawei phones. That mirrors a much larger tech reality, however, as many seemingly “competing” tech products come from the same core providers to a given tech company’s recipes. Yes, even Apple’s products are sourced this way.

I guess at least if we are all going to be gently shoved into the smartphone world, it’s good to see that it’s not going to be within a one-size-fits-all model, and variances for taste, style and usability will still be possible. What shape smartphone do you want?

So what do you do in the meantime?

For a (thankfully) decreasing number of users, dialup still remains the only method of internet access. They’re the communities that will benefit most from the NBN. The problem with dialup used to be speed, and it still is, but in a different way than a decade ago. Ten years ago, Dialup was common and web pages and Internet services were formatted with dialup users in mind. Today’s web pages and applications pretty much all presume you’re on some kind of broadband, and dialup won’t cut it for much more than very simple email checking.

What then of broadband? Here you split into several choices of broadband, dictated largely by where you actually are. Satellite broadband services (and associated technologies such as WiMAX) do cover some small (and mostly remote) pockets of Australia. Cable-based Internet speeds have increased in recent years on some services, but they’re still highly limited based on whether or not your home or business was a beneficiary of the cable rollouts of the mid 1990s, and the lack of price competition

For most people, broadband equals ADSL or ADSL2+ if you’re near enough to an ADSL2+ exchange. There’s been little to no movement in value in the ADSL space for years, as most of the hardware is Telstra-owned, even if it’s resold by other vendors. In the ADSL2+ space, there’s more competition, and as such a lot better value on offer — again if you’re near enough to an ADSL2+ exchange.

ADSL/ADSL2+ might be a bit stagnant in terms of the deals getting better, but where there’s a lot of movement in the consumer broadband space currently is mobile broadband. Traditionally, using mobile broadband was a lot like playing Russian Roulette with the contents of your wallet. Unless you were exceptionally careful about how, when and where you connected, your mobile broadband bill could quickly inflate to catastrophic bill shock dimensions.

That’s changed very rapidly in recent months, with a lot of pre-paid options giving you 1GB of data for as little as $15 per month. That kind of data rate makes some low-speed ADSL options a little obsolete, especially when you consider that your mobile broadband is indeed mobile. Coverage can still be an issue depending on where you are, but it’s improving. On a recent road trip between Sydney and Adelaide, I tested a Telstra microSIM in an iPad on the road between Hay and Balranald. For those who haven’t done that particular run, describing it as the middle of nowhere is pretty apt. At the time I was in the car — I should note that I wasn’t driving and web browsing at the same time — there were few other users on that stretch of track. The mobile broadband speeds I got were better than my home ADSL2+ connection.

That’s mildly annoying, and admittedly I’m not going to move to the middle of the Hay plain just in order to get faster broadband. Still, it does point to a genuine improvement in mobile broadband access that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

It’s a neat idea in a field that doesn’t see too many genuinely interesting ideas. Putting it simply, printing is sadly boring stuff, and something that most of us don’t care about a jot up until the printer jams or runs out of ink or toner. A printer’s job is a mundane one, and one that it doesn’t get a jot of credit for. For most consumers, the choice in buying a printer often seems to come down to whatever model is the cheapest on the shop floor. Often that’s astonishingly cheap. I’ve seen plenty of last year’s model printers on shop floors for less than fifty bucks, which on first glance seems like a steal.

Often, however, it’s anything but. There’s nothing wrong with the older technology per se, but what can trap printer buyers is both the cost of the ink and the quality of the output. It shouldn’t be a huge surprise to discover that cheaper printers often have worse print quality, especially for things like photo or colour printing.  One of the more interesting figures to come out of the launch I attended was that HP estimates that the era of printers being used for Word Processing predominantly is coming to an end. I’m certain that this doesn’t mean that the humble small office laser should expect a gold watch any time soon, but at a consumer level, things are shifting towards photo and web printing. Once you move from printing characters to how much of a character Uncle Trevor is, the quality of the output becomes a lot more important.

The ink/toner question is the other big “trap” in printer pricing. Buy a cheap printer, and it’s almost certain that the replacement cost for a full set of inks will be greater than the cost of the printer itself. Most (but not all) vendors have moved beyond including half-filled “starter” ink packs with printers, but it’s not environmentally friendly to junk a working printer just to get cheaper inks with a new one. Where you can save money here is in buying the bulk ink cartridges most vendors offer. Look for inks labelled as “XL” or “High Yield” or similar. You’ll pay a bit more for the inks upfront, but when they go through twice as many pages, the cost per page drops, not to mention the number of times you have to go to the shops to get new inks.

This has of course been tried before for a vast number of years, but when Google talks, people tend to listen. The company is packed with clever and committed developers, and more than a small quantity of spare change to throw at its projects. It also doesn’t hurt that Google has a lot of goodwill amongst all of its clients. For the average consumer, Google’s products work well and are mostly free.

Free’s a nice price to pay, but it ignored a key element of how Google makes money and pays for that “free”, and that’s through targeted advertising. Every Google search is logged and analysed, and if you’re a user of Google’s excellent mail client, gmail, you’ll notice more specific ads turning up next to your mail as well. This does worry some privacy advocates, but it’s clearly the price one pays for free services. If you want it free, you pay with ads. It’s the model (more or less) that television (with the exception of state-run services such as the ABC) has worked on for more than half a century.

Bringing more ads to TV, though? That’s an interesting prospect, given one of the first things that most buyers of personal video recorders do is work out the best way to enable ad-skipping, whether that’s just fast-forwarding through the ads (a limitation of any “Freeview” branded PVR) or skipping them entirely. GoogleTV will be a combination of a hardware product and a software platform. At first in the US this year Google will launch a set top box built by Logitech, and Blu-Ray player and TV built by Sony with inbuilt Google TV. As yet, international plans (including Australia) point to 2011 as the earliest we might see GoogleTV here.

Google’s main product is still of course search, and the ability to search for TV-specific content easily from your sofa is pretty compelling. I put the question around ad-skipping and how to sell consumers on getting yet another box to chuck under the TV that’ll serve ads to them to Google’s product manager for Google TV, Rishi Chandra at a recent Google event. His response was rather telling about where Google’s priorities actually are.

Chandra’s take on advertising for end users (that’s you and me and everyone else presumably watching a Google TV) is that we’d prefer targeted advertising specific to our searches and our profiles. They’re more useful, he told me, and if the economics are right and they’re particularly targeted we may end up with less of them.

On the other side of the coin, while it’s possible to strip ads out of Web pages if you’re so inclined or fast forward the ads on the TV if you’ve pre-recorded it, don’t look for that kind of feature in Google TV. One of the benefits (to the advertisers) that Chandra highlighted was that users couldn’t skip the ads. They could ensure that the ads were played and were trackable. Google can help the advertising community with lots more specific data via Google TV. At the end of the day, Google’s actual clients are the advertisers that give the company cash by the barrowload.

It’s a difficult line that Google has to tread. Its money comes from advertising, and even online there’s no such thing as a free lunch. It still leaves me wondering if it’s going to be worth investing in a TV with inbuilt Google (or a set top box, Blu-Ray player or whatever) in order to be served even more advertising that I can’t easily ignore.

It’s an interesting idea, but what really grabbed my attention and got me thinking was USB 3.0 specifically. Firewire and eSATA have their places, and they’re both significantly faster than the rather dusty USB 2.0 standard, but only USB 3.0 has the promise of both backwards compatibility and speed.

Quite a bit of speed, it should be said. USB 2.0 tops out at a theoretical 480Mbps, and a good bit slower in real world usage. USB 3.0’s promise is connection speed up to a theoretical 4.8Gbps. Again, we won’t see actual 4.8Gbps throughput, but even if USB 3.0 only manages a quarter of its potential, it’ll be much faster than USB 2.0. This has all sorts of knock-on implications, from the mundane matter of faster file copying through to data streaming, near invisible backup and seamless synchronisation of media devices.

There’s a problem, though. USB 3.0 requires two things to actively work. Firstly, you’ll need some kind of USB 3.0 storage device. As I write this, there’s one sitting just next to me. You wouldn’t spot it as USB 3.0 necessarily, but that’s due to the physical cabling being identical on first glance. This ensures backwards compatibility with older USB 2.0 only systems, albeit at USB 2.0 only speeds.

Backwards compatibility is a smart move, but the other part of the USB 3.0 puzzle is having a system that can actually take advantage of your investment in a USB 3.0 storage device.  USB 2.0 is everywhere, most notably in notebooks, which are quickly becoming the predominant computer model. If you want to add USB 3.0 to an existing desktop PC, there’s a number of available add-on cards. But for notebooks, there’s not such a wide choice. If your system has provision for a PC Express card you can update via a card, although there’s not a whole lot of choice right now. More problematically, PC Express isn’t widespread across notebook models, and notebooks simply aren’t built for the kinds of upgrades that can be applied to desktop systems. There aren’t any USB 3.0 capable notebook systems on the Australian market yet, and exactly when they’ll start to hit retail is still up in the air.

Most of us buy notebooks with the expectation that they’ll get at least three years service life out of them, especially if you’re buying for a small business and writing it off against tax. That could lead to a situation where USB 3.0 peripherals — and they’ll mostly be storage at first, as there’s little need for a mouse to use 4.8Gbps of bandwidth just yet — predominate, but few systems actually use them to their full potential.

Amazon’s Kindle is available in two varieties. There’s the smaller screen US$259 6″ (15cm) Kindle, and the larger US$489 9.7″ (25cm) Kindle DX. Both have the same feature set, so the US$230 price difference just buys you more screen real estate. I’ve listed the prices there in US dollars because that’s what Amazon will charge you for them even though you’re shipping them to Australia. As such, depending on how the currency conversion goes, the price of the Kindle may fluctuate on a daily basis.

The local iPad prices have finally been set in stone. Pricing for the WiFi-only models starts at $629 (16GB), $759 (32GB) or $879 (64GB), while the 3G and GPS equipped version costs $799 (16GB), $928 (32GB) or $1,049 (64GB). As yet, unlike the iPhone, no carrier has said they’ll sell the iPad on a phone-style contract basis, but data plans have popped up starting at $20 for a 30 day expiry period. That’ll get you 1GB of usage from Telstra and 2GB from Optus. At the time of writing, Vodafone had yet to commit pricing, but it’s not a great stretch to suggest they’ll fall somewhere in line with Telstra and Optus anyway.

In the Kindle’s favour, the cost of the device includes lifetime wireless data access for browsing and buying books from Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. Pick a title, and pretty much anywhere in Australia it’ll be sent to your Kindle for quick and easy reading. In the US, the Kindle also offers limited web browsing, and will shortly offer Twitter and Facebook compatibility, but the “International” model doesn’t offer web browsing, so it seems unlikely we’ll get Twitter or Facebook either. The Kindle uses an e-ink solution that mimics the look of real paper — to a certain extent — and uses very little power. Charge your Kindle up, and it’ll last a number of weeks.

The iPad, on the other hand, uses a more traditional LCD display, as you’d find in a notebook or netbook. This has the downside that power consumption is much higher, but it’s readable by itself without any external light source. It’s also a much more capable device, somewhat akin to — but not quite like — a notebook or netbook. It doesn’t come with free lifetime data, but then what you can do with that data is far more wide reaching.

The iPad is somewhat akin to an iPod Touch with a touch of Frankenstein to it, and as such most iPod Touch/iPhone Apps will run on it, save those that need phone or camera functionality. It’s a more complete device in that it’ll handle a lot of simple computing tasks, but only one at a time. Like the iPod Touch/iPhone, there’s no multi-tasking capability out of the box, although the promised 4.0 iPhone software update due later this year may deal with some of those woes.

The iPad’s likely to be more expensive than the Kindle for the foreseeable future, although the difference between the Kindle DX and iPad 16GB isn’t that great after currency conversion and GST are taken into consideration. The Kindle hits the eBook market quite hard and with focus, and if all you’re after is an eBook reader, it’s the one to beat in single use terms. There are plenty of competitors in the wings. The iPad’s an eBook reader, but also quite a bit more, and it’s priced somewhat accordingly.

The other time, of course, is when things go wrong. When your connection is slow, flaky, or worst of all inexplicably “down”, you’re going to want to know why, and fast. Quite how your ISP responds (if they respond at all) will form a big part of how you relate to them, as beyond picking your plan details, it’s the primary time that you do relate to them at all. If the support person has an impenetrable accent, a poor line connection, baffles you with jargon or rigidly sticks to a support script that doesn’t help you in the least, it can quickly get annoying.

A recent Roy Morgan poll of ISP Satisfaction ratings reveals some interesting figures.  Overall, ISPs must be getting something right. In the six month period from July to December 2009, 73.3% of surveyed customers were at least “satisfied”. Of those, 43.7 were “Fairly Satisfied” and 29.6%” were “Very Satisfied”. Breaking it out into the actual providers reveals a lot more detail. Internode (90.3% satisfied) and iiNet (86.8%) customers seemed happiest with their service.

The wooden spoons — those ISPs whose customers fell below the 73.3% industry average — fared worse. Amongst the major players, these included dodo (66.9%), Telstra BigPond (66.1%) and iPrimus (65.1%). The interesting thing there is the gap between the the bottom rung and top rung, which Roy Morgan notes is higher than in other service industries. In other words, where you might expect a small gap between ISPs depending on how cranky given customers were, it’s odd that it’s this large. Either the good guys are exceptionally good, or the bad guys are doing particularly poorly. Telstra’s a particularly interesting case, as they’ve still got the lion’s share of the overall market. Are Telstra customers more irritable with some facet of their service, or does the number of customers give rise to a higher level of “squeaky wheel” dissatisfaction?

So what can an ISP do to “improve” customer satisfaction, given that in an ideal world, the only time you’d even notice your ISP is if they improved your service?