I was surprised to read this (being 2010 and all), but then I remembered you live in the outback*, with (I'm guessing) slower-than-average internet speeds. What are the connections like there, RE?
The downloader of the 'bad' bootleg new release movies lives in a capital city and it boggles me, because he could just take her to the CINEMA and watch them on the big screen. He's been known to download and watch 'jiggly' movies with her that she's already seen at the cinema with her grandparents. In recent years he takes her out places like the zoo or swimming less and less and stays in to play computer games and watch downloaded movies more and more so I shouldn't be surprised. Strange man, but aren't all exes?
We only have Internode adsl not adsl2 here so we're just on a run of the mill 1500 connection I think, same as you get everywhere else. Lovely quality, no dropouts, no line noise, no complaints about the speed for anything. When we lived in an adsl-free area we had Telstra wireless and were getting 3 megabit quite consistently, albeit with a higher ping than adsl. The service quality was
very good, the problem with Telstra is the pricing. $130 for 10G including uploads, then shaped to 64k. It is cheaper now, but only on a new service on a 24 month plan.
My biggest complaint about the adsl-free area is simply the lack of television without a 2 billion foot high mast with a raft of amplifiers, which pretty much forces you to download (or ask someone in the city nicely to record) the stuff currently playing on free-to-air TV if you're interested in TV. That particular town - in the exact center of a known TV blackspot - is excluded from the retransmitted satellite free-to-air TV unless you pay a small fortune to a TV technician to say you can't get TV. Or just lie about your address, say you live 1km down the road, and get the decoder card for free. Which we never got around to doing. When they switch off analogue TV I hope someone puts in a retransmitter tower for digital, since none of the digital TV channels are being put on satellite.
Austar makes a fortune from these blackspot areas.