Some very interesting news coming out of Australia, the "America of the Southern Hemisphere," according to "America: The Book" from the Daily Show writers. (No, not the one in Europe. You're thinking of Austria.)

Sydney Morning Herald: Australia announces vast national broadband plan

First is the announcement that Australian Prime Minister John Howard has announced a $1.68 (US) billion plan to deliver broadband access to 99% of the Australian population by June 2009.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan said wireless was the best option for rural Australia because it was impossible to install cables which would reach every farm and property across the country.

"It's been specially developed for rural and regional areas, where (with) fixed broadband you've got to actually run a fibre optic," she said….

But the opposition labour Party attacked the plan, saying it was too little, too late ahead of this year's election and provided country people with a second-rate service.

"The government proposes a two-tier system -- a good system for the cities, they say, and a second-rate system for rural and regional Australia," labour leader Kevin Rudd said.

To give you an idea of some of the difficulties of Australian broadband - Australia has roughly the land area of America but less than 1/10th the population. Also, Australia is an island, which means that any cable linking to the rest of the world will be massively expensive to install and maintain. Some of the difficulties of Australian Broadband are explained here:

Forums.Mactalk.com.au: The Reason Australia Lacks Unlimited Internet Plans (Caution: Strong language)

Pseudonoymous poster "Brains" gives a very detailed - and somewhat coarse - rundown of why Australia has always had problems with providing broadband internet access to customers - and unlike many people in the area, he doesn't lay the blame completely at the feet of Telstra. He doesn't refrain from using vulgar adjectives to make his point, either. If Crocodile Dundee went into network administration, he would be Brains.

Because of the sheer distances involved, it costs an arm, leg, six puppies and your first three children per kilometer to lay cable anywhere. God's Own Earth Mate might have almost the same amount of land-mass as the USA does, but our national population is on par with that of the state of Texas. … Extrapolate that, and that means (roughly) that every kilometer of copper or fibre laid down costs we Aussie customers twenty times as much.

"But I live in a city, they live in cities too!" Sure you do. Sure they do. But we city dwellers have always subsidised our rural cobbers with their telephone service…

The USA consumes something on the order of 30% of the world's internet traffic, and most of it stays within the US borders. We here chew a piddly 5% or so, which considering our [expletive deleted] internet is a pretty herculean effort ... but where does the bulk of our internet content come from? Ahh, the US and Europe, a land-mass with an even higher population density.

So that means international cables, and they make our costs of running copper from Ballarat to Bendigo look like pocket change you couldn't buy a bag of mixed lollies for.

"Brains" also talks about the rise of P2P bandwidth - fueled mostly because Australians resort to BitTorrent to get television episodes of favorite series that haven't yet aired domestically, but which have aired in Europe and America - predicting that this added demand from what Australians dub "Channel BT" will cause Australia to eventually go to a pay-as-you-go service.

The story of BT resulting in a large spike in Internet traffic over the past couple of years is an old and familiar story, but Peter Wells has examined this story from the Australian viewpoint here.

Speaking of which,

TorrentFreak: HTTP Traffic Overtakes P2P, Courtesy of YouTube

According to a study from Ellacoya networks, HTTP traffic, at 46% of all Internet traffic, has actually beaten, relatively, P2P traffic, at 37%. Just two years ago, 65% of all Internet data was P2P traffic. This doesn't mean that P2P services are slowing down - just that HTTP traffic has grown immensely. The most likely culprit being video hosting sites such as YouTube, MySpace, etc.

A breakdown of the HTTP traffic reveals that audio and video streaming represents 41% of the HTTP traffic, half of that is caused by YouTube. Text and images from web pages are still using a bit more bandwidth (46%), but this won't be for long…

… The total volume of bandwidth that people consume will probably continue to grow in the years to come. New streaming services, and Internet based TV project such as Joost will require massive amounts of bandwidth. Also, BitTorrent is still gaining popularity, earlier this week we reported that Mininova is still growing at a rapid pace, they served 1 billion downloads in less than 6 months.