We are visiting scholars at the economics department of the University of New South Wales, and we are thoroughly enjoying our stay. Despite having academic qualifications, our professional lives have been spent in the "real world" of business, much of it in telecommunications, which today means broadband internet.

Our home is in the smallest and most rural state in the USA: Vermont. Our house gets four metres of snow, the thermometer regularly falls to -30 degrees celsius, the ground freezes two metres down every winter and the terrain is mountainous and heavily forested. Ergo, telecom infrastructure is difficult to build and maintain. Not surprisingly, much of the state has poor service — mostly obsolescent technologies like DSL and ADSL, plus band-aid systems like satellite or fixed mobile.

In Sydney we are staying in a flat in Randwick — a prosperous, densely populated residential district with magnificent weather: ideal for telecom infrastructure. It ought to be a telecom gem, served by the latest fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) networks. In fact we have the same poor service at our Sydney flat that we have in frozen rural Vermont. This is astonishing to us. If juicy suburban plums like Randwick have poor service what, is happening in the rural outback?

Akamai, a global internet company, recently rated connectivity in Australia as 60th in the world. Presumably rural areas are at the bottom of even that sad scale.