One in four Australian households and businesses can't use a phone line to download a simple Web page in less than six minutes, the Australian government's Productivity Commission said.

Only 73 percent of Australian Net customers have modem connections of at least 28.8kbps, compared with about 80 percent in the US, 90 percent in the UK and almost 100 percent in Canada. Only 60 percent of rural and remote users had data transmission rates of at least 28.8kbps, although this is double the 30 percent recorded in 1998. The Productivity Commission said 30 percent of the copper wire network was more than 30 years old although Telstra had recently promised to upgrade all lines to allow a minimum access speed of 19.2kbps. Meanwhile, availability or planned roll-out of alternative broadband technologies such as one-way satellite, ISDN or DSL was comparable to or ahead of the other countries, including New Zealand, Finland, France and Sweden.