Question 1: What type of turkey is it that you guys eat? (Like for Christmas)
Question 2: Why doesn’t there seem to be any reasonably priced internet providers that don’t have a pretty severe data per month cap?
Em, Q1 might be a bit unclear. My reading of Wikipedia is that turkey only exist in the Americas, but that there are two birds in Australia that are referred to as “turkey”.
Plus, within the US, there seems to be a bit of a distinction between the standardly sold turkey and “wild turkey”.
Unfortunately I have no idea as to the breed of turkey we eat down here, but it’s not a big tradition for most Australians to have turkey anyway.
For internet, you might want to check out whirlpool and sign up for the forums. It’s probably the most comprehensive website focusing on Australian internet issues and options.
I’m with iinet by the way and have been for the last 4 years or so. I’ve been with other providers, but iinet so far has been the best I’ve dealt with in terms of plan options, pricing, and technology.
Growing up in Australia, we had turkey sometimes at Christmas, but not all the time. In our family, it was more common to have ham, and some people prefer seafood. Also, quite a few people cook their turkey or ham the day before, and eat it cold on Christmas Day; remember that Christmas in Australia is in summer.
Anyway, i never gave much thought to what type of turkey we had. I generally assumed that it was a regular old commercial turkey like you get in the US, raised on farms specifically for human consumption. Australia does not have wild turkeys, as far as i know. IIRC, most turkeys for sale in Australian supermarkets generally come from Inghams and Steggles, the country’s two big producers of poultry meat.
There is also no Thanksgiving in Australia, so turkey (the whole bird) is eaten almost exclusively at Christmas. You can, however, buy sliced turkey meat in delicatessens and similar places year-round, for use on sandwiches, etc. Even with that, though, i can’t imagine that the Australian turkey industry is very big.
As for the question of ISPs and caps on data transfers, i’ve been away from Australia long enough that i don’t know too much about recent developments in the telecommunications industry. I know that it was deregulated, to a considerable extent, in the 1990s, but i’m not sure whether the structure of the industry, and levels of government regulation, are responsible for the relatively high costs of domestic internet service.
One thing that might be worth considering is the issue of economies of scale. Australia has a population slightly larger than the state of New York, in a land mass the size of the continental United States. That’s not very many people in a very large land area. Infrastructure costs, therefore, tend to be higher (especially on a per-capita basis) in Australia for things like telecommunications, roads, railways, etc., especially once you get away from the large population concentrations in the south-east.*
Now, that doesn’t necessarily explain why big cities like Sydney and Melbourne still have internet costs that are, for comparable plans, significantly higher than the United States. I was back in Australia over the summer, and a friend of mine in Sydney was paying about $A45 a month for a 3mbps connection, with a 6Gb transfer cap. If she wanted unlimited transfers, the costs was up over $A80. I pay about $US40 for 9mbps, and unlimited transfers.
One possibility is to chalk it up to greater competition in the US, but i’m not sure that’s the whole story, or even the main issue. After all, where i am in San Diego, there are essentially only two options for broadband internet—AT&T for DSL and Cox for cable. Time Warner cable operates in San Diego, but they and Cox have split the city between them so they don’t compete with one another. South of the river it’s Cox, north of the river it’s T-W.
I guess that was more of a series of speculations than an answer, but it’s all i’ve got.
- Some of the strongest opposition to the privatization of the Australia’s publicly-owned telecommunications company, Telstra, in the 1990s and early 2000s, came from rural areas. This is because many of those rural areas only had telephone service because it was heavily subsidized by the government and maintained by the public utility. Rural people recognized that if Telstra was completely privatized, it would have little financial incentive to maintain service to remote areas; it just wouldn’t make financial sense to maintain and improve expensive infrastructure for small, remote communities that could never cover the cost of their service.
There’s more than one kind of turkey? Meh, we didn’t have any varieties of turkey today at our Christmas celebration. It’s expensive and no one in the family loves it so we rarely have it. We had cold meats today - barbecued chicken, pickled pork, ham, some seafood (though I don’t eat it so I didn’t look closely enough to tell you what it was), roast beef.
Internet… WAG, the freaking huge cable across the bottom of the sea must have cost a fortune to set up and has been repaired at least once at a cost to someone. It is (or they are - I believe there are several of them now) also only capable of carrying so much traffic. Satellites might pick up the slack, but again they cost much money to set up and have a limit to how much data can be transferred at one time. The infrastructure simply wouldn’t cost as much in the US because you’re physically closer to the rest of the computers on the internet so therefore there shouldn’t be as much expensive involved in increasing bandwidth availability.
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Regular Turkey. Though only in recent years, before that just a roast chicken.
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Because the Pacific Ocean is freaking enormous.
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It’s a bird. It goes “gobble gobble”. Tastes even blander than chicken. I don’t think it’s any different to the turkeys everybody else around the world eats.
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Definitely it’s the Pacific Cable that is the excuse for the caps/expense of internet here. The ISPs have to pay the owner of the infrastructure, which is Telstra. Telstra can charge anything they want, legitimately, for use of their infrastructure, especially the international cable, so the best way to limit the expense for the customer is to enforce download limits.
We have quite good internet compared to some countries, and quite disappointing compared to some others. I think we’re somewhere in the middle in the quality/speed/bandwidth/reliability stakes.
Hm, well maybe my friend’s mom has special skill in cooking turkey because she was saying that all the turkey she has had (in Australia) is super flavorful, whereas all the turkey I’ve ever had (in the US) was bland as cardboard.
Could be. I’m not much of a fan of food, so my opinion probably isn’t typical.
I’m an American who actually prepared a Turkey Dinner in Australia for my Australian hosts last holiday season, and it seemed identical to an American turkey to me. First time my Aussie hosts had had a Turkey dinner–though no fresh cranberries could be found for love or money.
There are however a number of native Australian birds named ‘turkey’ cf bush turkey, but it’s only a name. They aren’t farmed or eaten.
How did they like it?
We’ve never had turkey, it’s chicken, ham and pork.
I have a suspicion that may have something to do with the way meat in general is raised in the US. I moved here from NZ/Aust and one of the first things I noticed was that most meat was kind of bland. From what I understand most meat animals in the US are fed not on grass (cattle, sheep etc) but on some kind of animal feed. And that they are not generally free-range.
No evidence for this but just projecting something I noticed since coming to the US
Baked turkey is not actually a good meat in the least although many Americans pretend it is once or twice a year. It is very bland. You can improve it by smoking or deep-frying it but that is basically a last resort although I find most Americans to be in denial about this. My FIL who is truly a world class importer of gourmet foods to the U.S. agrees so we both just pass on the turkey. If it were actually good, you would see people eating that year round but hardly anyone does.
The makers of turkey cold-cuts have found ways to make the deli and packaged products pretty good and useful but most people can’t do that at home. The American tradition of having baked turkey on Thanksgiving and them forcing it again on everyone a few weeks later on Christmas is an abomination I have no idea where it came from. It doesn’t make sense in any way.
We just always had steaks and seafood growing up for the holidays when I was growing up in Louisiana.
They seemed to like it a lot, though were very polite, unfailingly so, delightful people really, and couldn’t understand why being unable to locate fresh cranvberries was so upsetting to me. I think they thought it would be some kind of chutney, a sauce, rather than essential to an American Thanksgiving dinner, and I felt the dinner to be a failure on that account.
They did eat the entire bird, though, and found it very tasteful, not bland in the least.
I’m vegetarian so I have nothing to say about turkey.
My present internet plan is $17/month unlimited time/downloads (only available to dailup customers) through Telstra.
Australia has brush turkeys, but they’re not related to regular turkeys. Both ‘regular’ and brush turkeys are in the order Galliformes, but that’s as close as it gets: turkeys are in the family Meleagrididae, while brush turkeys are in the family Megapodiidae, along with mallee fowl.
And, by all reports, they make lousy eating. Not that I’m going to find out any time soon, since they’re a protected species, and thus unlikely to be appearing on many dinner tables.
That doesn’t really count in the sense that the OP is talking about. There’s pitifully little you can do effectively with a 56k dialup connection anymore (posting on messageboards is about it ;)) and “unlimited time” usually still involves you getting booted off after 4 hours or so anyway. And having to pay Telstra when you dial in again.
You can certainly get the “Gobble gobble” Turkey here year-round (Subway even have it for sandwiches if you’re that way inclined, and you can get it in the supermarket too) but “bush turkeys” are not generally considered “food” by most people and are generally left alone to do their thing.
I’m with TPG (ADSL2+) which is “up to” 24mbps. On speed tests I usually get about quoted about 10 down and 1 up. Their plans have peak times which suits me fine because it doesn’t matter to me what time I download things. I have read that they are NOT the ISP you want to be with if you want to play online games, but i have no first hand experience on that.