The world adores matt hayward

PREFACE. If you’re about to do your tax return, i’m about to save you 5 minutes. This is the link to the eTax executable for Windows XP SP2 and above for all I know. You could still read Pride and Predujdice while it downloads, but next time you see me you owe me a beer for saving you about ten clicks to get to the stupid sod.

Etax is not a new thing. I have been using it for at least five years now and I find it’s simply getting harder to download (e.g. navigating the ato.gov.au web site) and slower to download. Not the actions of a clever country.

At a time when the Australian federal government is talking up a nation-wide broadband network, is it little surprise they’re still coming up a little short online? What am I talking about? If you do your own tax return and you’ve submitted it by now, you’ll know what i’m talking about. Downloading eTax from the ATO web site is hideously, painfully slow. Seriously it takes about how long it took to download back anything back in 1995 when Mosaic was about the only browser around it and Netscape 1.0 wasn’t out yet. It may have been on a 24K modem, I can’t remember. What I can remember is how in 10 years, I thought ridiculously long download times for an 8 meg file would be a thing of the past. Clearly not.

So have I benchmarked my claims? Well yes. On an ADSL 2+ connection not more than 800 metres or so from the exchance I was downloading the eTax program at a transfer rate of around 6K per second. On a 3G HSDPA connection, alternating between3G and HDSPA speeds, the download is averaging 2-3K transfer rate per second. This is the speed of third world nations. By contrast, I can download the Firefox web browser at around 60K transfer rate per second. Updates for my Mac, around double that.

Sadly the ATO web site lacks the necessary bandwidth to handle the demand of people downloading eTax at once. One solution is that they massively upgrades their servers and throughput at the tax office, spending hundreds of thousands. But there are very simple solutions. Why don’t they make the downloadable eTax file available through sites designed to facilitate for quick downloads like Rapidshare or Yousendit? Better still provide a torrent, so you could download it over the peer to peer network, something that’s NOT illegal! You could even put it on a web site like CNET or TUCOWS that have mirrors with bigger, reliable ISPs all over the world!

These alternatives are not quantum physics or rocket science. They involve simply uploading a file and posting the link to it on the eTax website. Instead I have to waste and hour of my time on a Sunday. Because that’s how long it’s going to take to download this mundane file. Quite literally for a simple tax return, it will take longer to download the file than to complete the return.

So I put it to the government peeps who are going to take several months to chew the cud on tenders for the new Aussie Broadband network, is all that bandwidth going to make bugger all difference when you can’t organise downloads off of government web sites properly? I doubt it.

So to the bean counters at the ATO, pull your fingers out of your collective arses and do something about it. It’s not good enough. I had faster downloads in Cusco in Peru for crissakes! Who wants to bet I get audited next year….