A games developer in Brisbane was forced to send updated files to his audio designer in Melbourne, about 1600 kms away, using the postal service because his Internet service was too slow.

Morgan Jaffit, co-founder and creative director of Defiant Development, said he had no choice because uploading the files so his fellow developer could access them would take several days.

“It’s really the big file sizes that kill us,” Jaffit told The New York Times. "When we release an update and there’s a small bug, that can kill us by three or four days."

Defiant's game Hand of Fate has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands.

The NYT article, headlined "How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout", provided some measure of detail on why the NBN has not the speed expectations of the populace.

It said, "Australia, a wealthy nation with a widely envied quality of life, lags in one essential area of modern life: its Internet speed.

"...In the most recent ranking of Internet speeds by Akamai, a networking company, Australia came in at an embarrassing No. 51, trailing developing economies like Thailand and Kenya."

The author, Andrew McMillen, wrote that Australia risked "being left behind at a time when countries like China and India are looking to nurture their own start-up cultures to match the success of Silicon Valley and keep their economies on the cutting edge".

Rod Tucker, a professor the University of Melbourne and an expert adviser on the NBN project, was quoted as saying: “Australia was the first country where a totally national plan to cover every house or business was considered.

“The fact it was a government plan didn’t necessarily make it doomed. In Australia, we have changes of governments every three years, which really works against the ability to undertake long-term planning, and the long-term rollouts of networks like this.”

The story of how politics intermingled with technology to drag out the project and bring it to its current mess as written by McMillen is not being repeated here as Australians know all about it.

Andrew Barnes, the chief executive and co-founder of education technology company GOI, was quoted as saying, "As a software company, our two main costs are Internet and staff. If the former was lower, then we have more to spend on building up the team."

Barnes was said to be paying $1000 a month for a 100Mbps connection. He lamented that his employees in Vietnam encountered fewer issues when they tried to join the company’s weekly webinars.

“Vietnam’s one of those countries where you look out the window and the telephone wires are just a mess,” Barnes said. “But somehow, despite the obvious infrastructure problems, the Internet there is much, much better."