Spanspek

My family and I spent a bit of time in Foster, South Gippsland, between Christmas and New Year. (Happy New Year, by the way!) When we go there, we have to use my ISP's national dial-up number. This is a pain because:

1. We've become accustomed to the speed of broadband connection, even if we were forced to hang off Telstra's hardware (but I can change that now -- woo hoo).
2. I can't get my Opensuse install to communicate with the Thinkpad's modem. It's infuriating because the first version of Suse I used I paid for and it worked perfectly well with that. I have worked out that it's probably a problem with pppd's configuration, but which settings are conflicting I can't figure out. Anyway, the problem is that it doesn't even get as far as addressing the modem! So I have to reboot into Windows, which works perfectly well with the modem. (That said, while I managed to get Windows working with the broadband, I can't now. It doesn't help that there are about half a dozen entry points into network settings, none of which seem to be consistent with any of the others.)

So I got to thinking about broadband in general and what it means. The current government's National Broadband Strategy seems unlikely to improve the problem I'm about to describe.

Currently, to get broadband one chooses a provider and that provider pays Telstra some ludicrous amount of money for a technician to go into the exchange and insert a plug into a socket. So, potentially, every phone connection could be broadband enabled, as long as there were enough DSLAM ports in the exchange. This could change with a fibre-to-the-node or fibre-to-the-home but the potential remains.

So how hard would it be to have broadband remotely turned on or off for any phone connection at any time? Surely, if there were one broadband connection for every phone connection in an exchange, the switching could be done with some sort of router.

What I'm thinking here is how great it would be if I could notify my ISP of a change of phone number and have the connection moved for a time, and then moved back. I could go on holiday for a week and take broadband with me, without the holiday phone having to be ADSL-enabled (and paid for) all the time.

Of course this would require a lot of cooperation between providers and probably isn't possible if this or a future government doesn't re-nationalise the physical phone network. (Telstra's extortionate charging for access to the national network which was built with taxpayers' dollars is a manifest demonstration of how contrary to the public interest was the selling off the network.)

I can dream, can't I?