Yesterday marked the 1st anniversary of Robyn and I moving from Paddington in Sydney to Berry on the South Coast of NSW.

It has been great to get away from the city, particularly at a time when our state government seem so intent on utterly screwing the place up. I think that they have the same fundamental attitude as the Bush White House did - get as much as possible for #1 while you can, because tomorrow it will be too late.

It is this absolutely endemic attitude of personal bald faced greed that is destroying the world. Whether it is Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, Dick Cheney... They all share one thing - a total disdain for the public good. They are in it for themselves.

Now you can say that this is what capitalism is all about. But that isnt true. Capitalism, when it is working properly, is in balance. When in balance it rewards all the stakeholders in the ecosystem. People who are motivated succeed.

The government talks about needing to ensure that there is a free market. Why is it that consumers aren't presented with the opportunity to match like to like in the Internet space?

When I moved in to Berry, I was expecting to be able to subscribe to an ADSL connection; not as fast as cable, but respectable. Unfortunately the available bandwidth in copper in the ground in my street had all been fully deployed so my only alternative was to sign up for Telstra NextG. (Very expensive, comparatively, and pretty slow).  But at least I was able to collect email...

Then I found ou that Optus offer a wireless service that is much more competitively priced than Telstra. Problem was that my house is just out of sight of the Optus tower, so no signal.

So then I found out that I might be eligible for a Government Broadband Subsidy, since I couldn't get ADSL. On calling I found that this was true, and that it would be possible to get a satellite delivered service (up and down).

I signed up for a service with Harbour IT. There were about four choices but I chose them for the worst of reasons, and without checking blogs and forums, because they were based in Mudgee (where I used to own a deer farm).

Ever since the installation of the dish, unfortunately there seem to have been problems. First it was the latency issues. I had no idea that a satellite connection would be that slow.... Then it was the speed of the connection.... And then the billing system. And it continues.

So I have been in touch with the Telecommunications Ombudsman to see what they can do. I told them the story and advised that I would be well within my rights to make a complaint.

That has been done, but now I am starting to feel that the problems for this ISP are endemic. It seems that as you peel off a layer of the onion, new problems emerge.

That is why I think that if there was a Bush Broadband Blog there would be an opportunity for everyone that is a customer to make comments about the level of service that they get from their ISP. Through doing this and making the public review peer reviews of an ISP I believe that it will ensure that ISP's deliver into the promise they make with their customers or risk losing them.

In fact I believe that the government should legislate, in the same way that they have with the retail banks in Australia, that people should not be penalized for swapping ISP's.

At that point I believe that ISP's will either have to shut up shop because they dont know how to be competitie, or they will grow by acquisition and become forces to reckon with.

Since the Internet is now a public utility there should be no excuse for the government to not ensure that there is an absolute committment to a Universal Service Obligation.