Last week the ACMA Communications Report 2007-2008 tabled in Federal Parliament revealed that using the internet is an everyday experience for many Australians. 55% of Australians are identified as ‘heavy’ internet users, going online eight or more times per week.
Gone are the days too when we had to assume that dial up connections were the norm. Of an estimated 7.23 million internet subscribers, 5.66 million are on Broadband. Figures like these had already been released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in September 2008. The ABS report highlighted “Connections with download speeds of 1.5Mbps or greater increased to 3.10 million or 43% of all subscribers, compared to 2.47 million or 36% of subscribers at the end of December 2007.” Wireless connections accounted for 14% of all broadband subscriptions at the end of June 2008.
Basically what we are talking about here though is connectivity at home. The National Vision of Connectivity for Australian Schools is part of the Digital Education Revolution Implementation Roadmap.
At a nationally aggregated level, a baseline survey responded to by 92.3 per cent of government school authorities, Catholic and independent school sectors shows that 47.0 per cent of schools use fibre connections and the majority of all schools (80.5 per cent) use download speeds of up to 4 megabits per second. Under the FCS, the Australian Government has allocated $100 million to support the deployment of high speed broadband connections to Australian schools.
Bandwidth appears still to be a serious issue for many rural and regional tertiary institutions, despite the AARNet network.
Another report has suggested that nearly 75% of Australia’s population are internet users.
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