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 Web isn’t constrained by the terms of television, however. I’ve recently become aware of a fascinating project being undertaken by the BBC, called Dimensions. Dimensions is, in its own words, an experiment in “in trying to find new ways to communicate history.”. Specifically, what Dimensions does is use global map data — if you can name it you can find it — and then superimpose the effects of a given historical event over that area, to give the reader a genuine sense of the scale of an event.

There’s some fun stuff in there — like being able to see how long the Space Shuttle runway would be if it was located in the middle of Melbourne (http://howbigreally.com/dimension/space/shuttle_runway#Melbourne) or what would happen if you dropped St Peter’s Basilica in the middle of Canberra (http://howbigreally.com/dimension/festivals_and_specticles/pope_st_paul#canberra).

What really grabbed my attention were the disaster superimpositions. It’s all too easy to forget about a crisis when it’s a thirty second news spot and the camera only focuses on a couple of people. But drop it into your neighbourhood, and you get a proper sense of the scale, and almost inevitably start thinking about the consequences. The recent floods in Pakistan might seem quite far away, but if you dropped them, on say, Adelaide (http://howbigreally.com/dimension/environmental_disasters/pakistan_floods#adelaide), the scope of the disaster shifts from distant to breathtakingly close.

Or take the Pacific Garbage Patch. This was one I didn’t know anything about, and the short version is this; there’s two large swirling patches of garbage floating either side of Hawaii, held in place by ocean currents. When you think of Hawaii, you probably think of dusky island maidens and delicately lit beaches, rather than fetid stinking pools of swirling plastic and muck. But hey, it’s only a little garbage in a big ocean, right?

Well, not so small. If you superimpose it over, say, Alice Springs (http://howbigreally.com/dimension/environmental_disasters/great_pacific_garbage_patch#Alice_Springs) you’ll get a better idea of the scope of the problem — especially as that’s only half of it!

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.

Browser choice is a bit like choosing “your” brand of car. There’s a lot of attachment to whatever you’re used to, and getting out of the habit of just clicking on the same icon every time you want to check out the Web can be tough. It’s a worthwhile task, however, as the feature set of each browser can be surprisingly different. It can also reveal some interesting things you may not have considered about how and why you browse. Given that all of the major browsers are free and generally they’re not huge downloads, there’s no implicit reason why you can’t have multiple browsers installed.

It’s very much a personal taste test kind of thing. I try to switch browsers every once in a while if only to stay current with the market, but that’s not something you particularly need to worry about. What can be worth considering are the individual features that each browser offers.

Microsoft often throws some interesting tech ideas into each new release of Internet Explorer, although I’ve got to admit I don’t use it all that much. That’s more to do with doing most of my writing work on a Mac, however. Microsoft abandoned IE for Mac with version 5, whereas the current PC version is IE 8. Even Microsoft doesn’t recommend anyone use older versions of IE for security reasons, but when I am working on a PC I give IE a spin to see what’s fresh and new. As a Mac user you might expect I’d use Safari, but beyond its Top Sites splash screen — very handy if you repeatedly visit the same sets of Web sites — I’ve never found it that compelling. Likewise Opera, although the company’s mobile versions of its product do run well on smartphone platforms such as Blackberry and surprisingly even Apple’s iPhone.

Firefox is beloved by many for its extensibility. Some of its features are a little silly, like the Persona themes introduced in the most recent version, but other extensions are distinctly handy. Google’s Chrome is fast catching up to Firefox in the extensions stakes, and at the time of writing is my browser of choice simply because it’s so particularly fast.

That could change. Despite the browser being “free”, the browser wars are far from over. Thankfully, the casualties are usually just code, and the cost of entering this particular war only involve a little bit of download time.

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.

From one perspective, this makes a lot of sense. A router acts like a digital post office, sending your internet connection to any computer (or other device) you’d care to share your internet connection and files with. There are some pretty well known problems with security — especially wireless security — with routers, but there’s a bigger and more fundamental problem. Most routers can be utter torture just to get up and running.

I was recently at the launch of a new range of Belkin routers where the company revealed some of its support statistics. Belkin, like most vendors, offers two different ways to set up one of its routers. Those with plenty of networking knowledge can dive right into the web-based interface, tweaking MTU, VPI and PPPoE settings to their heart’s content. That’s not most folks, however. Most people will opt for the installation CD provided with the router, hoping that the automated setup wizard will step them easily through getting the router working.

Quite how many fail is rather eye opening. Only 10% of those who buy a router, according to Belkin, will get it working without having to call tech support, and even those folks have to interact with the router some 45 times — presumably that’s a lot of button clicking and password entry — before things are up and running. That’s a lot of stress in an area that few people are all that au fait with, really. I’m in a position where I do know my way around a router, but to put it in a context for myself, if I had to interact with my car 45 times before I could get it started, I’d give up and take the bus every time. And I really don’t like the bus much.

There’s a certain undeniable extent to which networking can’t be made easy when and if things go wrong, as there’s a lot of failure points to deal with. One solution would be to go for a product that’s either pre-configured by your ISP, which often comes with the extra dangling carrot of being “free”, or at least rather cheap. You can’t get something for nothing, however, as most of the models sold this way are locked to a single ISP, and they’re not always optimally configured in terms of wireless security in any case. Change ISPs, and you’d have to wastefully get an entirely new router, or pay a penalty fee for “unlocking” your own property. This isn’t always the case, so be sure to check carefully upfront.

Online privacy is a complex and undoubtedly touchy subject, if only because it means different things to different people. An eight year old’s understanding of privacy is quite different to an eighteen year old’s, and even more removed from that of an eighty year old’s, for that matter. Some folk are naturally extroverted, while others sit at home frantically wrapping tin foil round and round their skulls.

There are a few basic things that you should keep in mind in terms of online privacy, however.

1) Your private information is valuable

I’m not just talking credit card numbers or your mother’s maiden name here. As an example, If you’ve used social media platform Twitter and ever mentioned a hot topic — be it iPads, Justin Bieber or Arab-Israeli politics — chances are you’ll pick up a whole bunch of “interesting” followers. You might not think it, but the things you choose to chat about online reveal plenty of private information about you. Automated Twitter followers are just the thin end of the wedge. Advertisers love knowing more about you, because it allows them to send more targeted ads. Targeted ads are more likely to result in sales, which means money. Hence, your private information is valuable, and not just to you.

2) If you don’t put it up there, it’s not going up there (maybe)

This is one of those obvious-in-hindsight things. You can’t stop your house being in public view, but you can pull the curtains to stop folks peering in through the curtains. The same is true online. If you don’t post pictures to Facebook of the company party, then they’re less likely to go up there. I say less likely, because you might not be the only one with a camera, and if you share the shots someone else might get that bright idea. As such, sensitive information (whatever it might be) should be shared with the implicit understanding that you want it to remain private.

3) The Internet is forever

Just like that awesome tattoo of Guns N Roses that you figured was a great idea to get embedded on your forehead at age 18, really. Often, it’s just as “good” an idea as the tattoo might have been, but the consequences will last long beyond your initial interest in most cases.  As plenty of public figures and companies have discovered, once it’s online, chances are if there’s interest in it, it’s staying up there — somewhere. There are legal remedies for issues such as libel, but even those create a virtual paper trail drawing attention to the issue involved.

4) Keep yourself safe and secure

A well trodden path here, but one that crops up over and over again. The Internet can be great for meeting new folks, but don’t lose sight of common sense. Just as it can be used to maintain privacy, it can also be used to create a false facade. As cartoonist Peter Steiner put it all the way back in 1993, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you’re_a_dog). Or a con artist, or worse. In financial matters, this means making sure any site that asks for financial or personal information is secured. Look at least for a padlock symbol in the address bar or bottom of Web pages, keep anti-virus software up to date, and do a quick Google search for the company name before committing any funds. Adding the qualifier “sucks” (or similar) may bring up customer complaints. Too many complaints? Find another online store.

For personal interactions it’s even more vital to stay safe. Not everyone online is out to get you, certainly, but some sensible actions when meeting online “friends” in real life should include only meeting in public places, and preferably in the company of an actual friend of your own. It may create some initial social awkwardness, but it beats many of the sad alternatives.

With that in mind, my ears pricked up recently when attending a product launch for networking firm Netgear. To kick things off, representatives showed off survey figures that outlined the current home usage patterns of the Internet across all users. There’s some interesting figures that show what we use the Net for from home locations.

It shouldn’t come as much of a shock that Web and Email use tops the list, with 90% of respondents using both services. An NBN isn’t likely to change the usage there, although it would enable larger files to be sent via email or viewed via the web with more ease.

51% of respondents used social networking, and I suspect that’s a figure that’s only going to rise. If you strip out the formal business requirements of email, there’s a lot of messages sent that are better suited to social networking sites and services, and that’s even without taking into consideration professional social networks such as LinkedIn.

46% of respondents use the internet to download music and video. There wasn’t a breakout for those doing so legally or illegally, although that’s hardly surprising. Nobody’s likely to dob themselves in on a survey. Obviously a faster broadband infrastructure would enable this to run faster, but it could also serve in the fight against copyright infringement nicely. As Apple proved with iTunes, once you can deliver customers fair quality content quickly and at a good price, the market will follow.

45% of those surveyed used the Net to work from home. That’s a big area where a faster broadband infrastructure could have huge implications for how we all live our lives. Not every job can be taken online, but the facility to quickly and seamlessly access work from home, or telework entirely could be exceptionally useful. Then again, it could lead to a nation of overworked employees.

An equal 45% used the net to watch movies, TV or video. That’s distinct from the downloaders. These are folks watching YouTube and its many imitators. Again, the NBN case here is pretty obvious, and even has employment implications. Once you can stream good quality video anywhere across the nation, if you’ve got a great idea for a TV program, who needs the free to air networks any more?

The rest of the figures skew a little lower — 34% for instant messaging chat, 30% for internet radio and 23% for gaming. One figure that did surprise me a little was that only 24% of respondents used internet access from home for webcam or voice over IP services. Considering the convenience and cost savings that services like Skype offer, it’s interesting that the takeup is comparatively low.

There’s dozens of usage scenarios beyond home usage that an NBN could address, but rather like putting today’s broadband up against the first 400kbps connections I ever used, it’s tough to entirely visualise them. Telemedicine is an often chosen target, but there’s plenty of scope for other uses, both professional and personal. I reckon it’ll be very interesting to revisit those figures in a decade’s time. What will we be  using the broadband of the future (no matter what form it takes) for then?

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.

You can already get a taste of how IPTV could work through services like Channel 7’s Plus7, Channel 9’s Fixplay, Foxtel’s Downloads and ABC TV’s iView platforms. They’re not even limited to your internet-connected computer, with several TV makers offering Channel 7 options, and ABC’s iView available through the Playstation 3 console. Fire up a web browser and go to the relevant site and a wealth of Internet-delivered TV goodies are yours for the viewing.

There’s a couple of minor catches with these approaches. First of all, they play pretty much exclusively in the “catch up” space. Most of them work off time limited availability of recently run programs. Great if you’ve missed the last episode of 24, but only within a week or two. Some older programs are available on a consistent basis, but the quality varies. Not so much the quality of the programs, as tastes may vary, but the quality of the encoding used to convert them. Sitting down with Channel 7’s Plus7 to enjoy an episode or two of the genuinely classic Father Ted, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of blockiness and digital artefacts making the experience a lot less compelling than it should be.

There are solutions on the horizon that may fix the “Catch Up” nature of these services. A company called FetchTV is promising up to 20 channels and a video on demand service over the Internet to be launching this year. iiNet’s already signed up to deliver the service, which is expected to cost “under $30″ per month. $30 per month might sound like a lot for Internet-delivered TV, and they’ll certainly have to iron out quality and speed of delivery issues, especially with the woeful speeds that many Australians have to suffer through.

The big issue with IPTV is that you’re likely to be paying for it either way. iiNet’s said that they won’t count FetchTV content against a user’s data cap, but then they’ll be getting $30 (or more) of your hard earned cash upfront.  A handful of ISPs (including Internode, iPrimus, Adam and iiNet) offer iView unmetered, but it’s really the exception rather than the rule. For everyone else’s services, you’ll pay in the form of your data allowance. A typical program may chew up hundreds of megabytes of download allowance, but as they’re really streaming rather than downloading, you’ll be using up that data without being able to easily re-watch downloads at a later date. If you’re on a plan that charges for excess data, that could get expensive fast, and even those on capped plans that drop speed may find a large part of their month’s service at crawling rates if they get too keen on Desperate Housewives.