Australian ISPs give thumbs up to controversial content filtering, see no speed reduction

The Australian Federal Government's controversial plan to install ISP-level content filters has managed to make it to the widespread testing phase, and challenging the long-held criticism that such filters would slow down Internet speeds as much as 75% percent, ISPs testing the filters now report minimal slowdown.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority began testing the filters in February 2008 in Tasmania before open testing was slated to begin. In these tests, one of the filters tested registered 2% "network degradation," while three registered under 30% and two degraded network performance by more than 75%.

One year later, five of the nine major ISPs participating in the government's tests (iPrimus, Netforce, Nelson Bay Online, WebShield, and OMNIconnect) say the filtering solutions do not present any significant slowdowns or improper blocks of acceptable content. The remaining ISPs in the test did not comment.

"From a technical perspective we're more than confident that if the government decided to roll out a mandatory Internet filter based on or around an Australian Communications and Media Authority [ACMA] blacklist or subset thereof, then it can be done without any impact whatsoever to the speed of the Internet," WebShield managing director Anthony Pillion told ARN.

The controversial "clean feed" plan mandates this filtering technology for all ISPs, and these tests will likely be used to refute the opposition that use slowdowns as a cornerstone to their anti-filtering campaigns.

But now that speed is no longer an issue, the accuracy of the filters will be. Unfortunately there are no parameters for just how accurate the filters have to be, and the Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy Steven Conroy refuses to set them up until after the tests are finished.