Australia:
Currently in Australia, mobile phone services reach 99% of Australians. For those who cannot receive this service, Australia has also equipped the country with satellite phone services. This feature is seen prominently in less densely populated areas where typical mobile phone services cannot reach.
Citizens of Australia have access to the worldwide news through various media outlets, including the Internet, mobile devices, and television and radio sources.
By 2011, 79% of homes in Australia had access to broadband Internet. In Australia, the Internet is most popularly used outside of the business environment for checking email, 91% of users, research, news and general browsing, 87% of users, and paying bills, 64% of users.
Today, 18.7 million working television sets are found in the homes of Australia, averaging 2 televisions per home. The country boasts having 133 mobile lines of phone connection per everyone 100 citizens, meaning there are currently 30,200,000 mobile phones in use in Australia.
New Zealand:
In New Zealand, 99% of homes have access to mobile phone lines. There is 111.1 mobile phones lines activated for everyone 100 citizens, meaning the country has a total of 4,922,000 mobile phone lines in use.
Contrary to the vast majority with mobile phones in New Zealand, only four out of every five homes have access to the Internet to use it at least once a week. Although New Zealand has 3.4 million Internet users nationally, the digital divide has become a great topic of discussion within the country as only 40% of homes have direct access to the Internet.
For the majority of the population, television and radio are the most prominent forms of technology used at home. People do, however, obtain a great deal of world news at work from the Internet.
In New Zealand, people are limited to watching three broadcast channels. This greatly affects their access to what media they are able to view.
Is New Zealand being too strict with the technological services its provides? Is the digital divide an actual issue in New Zealand? Or is Australia just to loose with the technological access it gives to its people?
Tell us what you think!
Link:
http://www.communications.gov.au/
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats
One thought on “Some Technological Notes to be Considered”
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Australia has equipped the country with satellite phone services serving the main purpose of catering to the less densely populated areas of the country where typical mobile phone services do not reach. At first, it makes sense to think that Australia would add phone usage to areas where there is not much phone access. Where there is less, we should add more. Right? However, this makes me wonder how much access the residents of those less densely populated areas truly want to communicate with the outside world. If those people choose to live in areas with little access to phone services and far away from highly populated areas, could they want to avoid communication? Through this project and these blogs, we have learned so much about media access and it seems that the majority of us view the denial of media access as a bad thing. However, after reading this post about Australia, I have discovered a new perspective on media access. Maybe it is not such a bag thing to have little access to communication sources.
Learning that there are 18.7 million working TV sets in Australia, averaging 2 televisions per home, puts the amount that Australians consume media in perspective for me. I always thought it was normal to have multiple TV sets in one house but this blog made me realize that that is excessive. I would be curious to find out the literacy rates of family members living in homes with high usage of TV, radio and Internet compared with households with low usage of these media sources.