Coffee is awesome: babies don’t lie.

Not only does caffiene have scientific memory and productivity benefits for adults, it also helps prem babies remember to breathe!

Bandwidth around the world, but not for Australians

Professor Joshua Gans, world-renowned economist and Australia-renowned Internet expert, reports on Internet speeds around the world in his CoreEcon blog at economics.com.au.

His findings are that you can, generally, get the same download bandwidth in Australia as in the US or Japan. However, he also notes that upload bandwidth for households in Australia is crippled.

The Internet pipes between countries are plenty big enough; you already know that the only thing limiting your bandwidth (in a practical sense) is “the last mile” of the ADSL/cable/NextG service to where one happens to be accessing the Internet.

It’s interesting that Australia was the only place where you were subjected to a strictly limited upload rate. With some cable systems (servicing internet and TV, like Foxtel), or one-way satellite links, this is because of an actual technical limitation. But in general, internet services are only restricted like this because the internet companies have made a commercial choice.

They limit your ability to send data at high speed, and “cap” you for breaching silly “download limits”. The reason, of course, is that they hate to have to pay for all your email, photos and other important data to move over the Southern Cross link from Sydney to California. As everybody knows, everything good on the internet is in California.

Moving data inside Australia need not be expensive. Moving data internationally need not be expensive either, but hey, if you owned one of only two internet links between Australia and the world, you’d charge an exploitative price too, wouldn’t you?