[kalleboo]

2 megabit is far lower than the best case for 3G HSDPA...

My parents live in rural Australia and their internet is 3G through a basic roof-mounted 850 MHz whip antenna getting a signal from some 15-20 km away, and they get a solid 6 MBit down, which is fine even for a decent-quality YouTube stream. Their main hurdle is the $8-10/GB that Telstra charges for the privilege.

[voltagex_]

That's good to hear - I think that's HSPA instead of original 3G. VividWireless wasn't an option?

[kalleboo]

The original 3G was 384 kbps... I doubt there are many places left on the planet still running that.

VividWireless looks like it only exists near cities, no coverage at my parent's address. None of the other main wireless providers (Optus, Vodafone) have signals anywhere near them, only Telstra NextG. They're even lucky when it comes to geography since they live on the right side of the valley... 800m in the other direction and they'd be in radio shadow. Even Telstra's own coverage map doesn't actually show coverage for them!

Last time I was there I read that Telstra was building a 700 MHz LTE network. If that replaced the 850 MHz HSPA network and reached them they could get some really great speeds.