[c23gooey]

First of all, its hard to build an internet business when you dont actually have internet access.

Also, the vast majority of internet plans in Australia, provide very little upstream bandwidth.

Your right, the market being targeted is irrelevant to the speed of internet.

With regards Amazon / Google, they need to get their files onto those services in the first place. This ties into your point of getting work done.

When it takes a day to upload 1GB of data - business starts to suffer.

Faster internet, especially upstream would not change the quality of ideas coming out of Australia, but it would remove a significant bottleneck in terms of getting things done.

[jfoster]

Everywhere urban in Australia does already have internet access. For that reason, I don't understand your first point.

The upstream bandwidth isn't hampering any businesses that I am aware of, but I agree that businesses uploading large amounts of data may struggle with it. (sidenote: would it be worth spending so much on infrastructure to support those few businesses?) That said, my understanding is that the upstream bandwidth is intentionally capped by ISPs rather than being a result of the infrastructure. Even with the most amazing infrastructure, you would need to convince ISPs to drop the artificial limitation.

There is also an emerging behaviour where all data crunching is being done on machines in the cloud. In that case, not much of the data would ever even enter Australia unless you wanted it to.