How to Invest Outside the Government-Controlled System

Evolution - YES, Revolution - NO. Technology has peaked. Nothing revolutionary has been done since the 70s or even before that. Big companies are to blame, buying up all the ideas and shelving them (most get forgotten) to get the ROI on current tech.

 

I've done that once already today myself.

Some things must be worth saying twice

 

That's the whole point of making a forecast. Many of those predictions are perfectly logical and simply extrapolate on from existing usage patterns.

Its not a huge stretch to say that since bandwidth has increased everywhere that bandwidth will continue to increase everywhere. People everywhere use bandwidth for the same things.

Cisco is obviously in the hardware market, but whether their attempt to correctly forecast future consumption patterns is a "conflict of interest" or a normal commercial interest in getting it right depends largely on how cynical you are (and I am cynical by nature which is why I think they don't need to turn the study into a sales pitch because they'll make as much money simply by correctly predicting what will happen. They'll send their sales people out later to actually get signatures on the dotted line).

Do we need streaming HDTV? No, not really, but we're going to want it. Obviously exponential growth is impossible, but we're nowhere near our potential peak since we can't even get streaming HDTV yet.

And the Cloud? People have been saying its a fad for years, yet it continues to grow and people keep finding new ways of using remote applications. It's potential is limited to everything that everybody in the world currently does on their local devices which is a staggeringly large amount of stuff.

Its been a pretty reliable metric in the past. I used to max out a 28.8k modem and now I'm maxing out 24Mbit ADSL2. I used to max out GPRS on a Nokia 5110 and now I'm maxing out 3G on an iPhone. I'm not an atypical user. People who have more bandwidth end up finding useful things to do with it.

Because in the long run is it is cheaper by orders of magnitude to do it all in one go. Imagine there are twenty houses in one street and having technicians come out out twenty times to roll a single strand of fiber from the node to each house individually.

Building excess capacity into networks has been standard practice for decades because it is simply too costly to build network infrastructure incrementally.

The network engineers designing and building the NBN argue that "good value for money" is about $37 billion (remembering that they're the ones saying it isn't worth the cost of connecting the last 7% of users to fiber).

The problem is the (current) distribution model. The production companies make what people pay them to make and at the moment they're paid by middlemen. That's why anonymous executives at a Murdoch owned media company get to kill off popular/imaginative/quality content at random.

When the people who experience the content can pay the creators directly, the "spoonfeeding" will start to die off and more innovative business models will take over.

 

Hey Big A.D., dogmatix, etc. Ordinarily I am in favour of privatisation, but I was wondering whether NBN Co should be treated as a special case?

My thinking is that (unless the laws are changed) the Govt will create an artificial monopoly that will have very low operating costs. Consequently, unlike electricity generators etc there won't be much potential to make significant productivity gains and, given the anti-compete clauses, won't be able to use its balance sheet to enter new areas. Hence it will simply be a highly regulated cash cow. In this artificial conditions would we (taxpayers and consumers) get any real gain by privatising NBN Co?

No doubt they'll just force encourage our superfunds to buy something we already own to enable some other random spend.

Thoughts appreciated.

 

We have the benefit of Telstra's history to guide our decisions in this respect

Although, Govt owned enterprises are notoriously inflexible and will have higher staff wage overheads, more red tape, etc.

But I dint think it should be owned by private interests, just managed privately perhaps.

 

If you want to make a submission to the Government enquiry into whether or not they will grant themselves authority to implement total surveillence of your online interactions, transactions and to profile you, then the Greens have a handy little form letter to help, with addresses and such to make the submission.

Scott Ludlam also had a few interesting words in an email today ...

 

In case anyone is thinking about making a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security regarding the proposal of Nicola Roxon to record all your electronic communications and transactions, here are the email details of the committee and a copy of my submission as a reference.

 

If you're trying to preserve the sacred cow of privacy in this country, I'm afraid you're too late.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q="the+right+to+privacy+is+not+absolute"+australia

BTW, I'm not using LMGTFY in a sarcastic way. It's just a useful tool to make a point.

 

I'm in favour of privatisation where its appropriate too.

For example, the government probably isn't the best structure for running a "phone company" and I don't want some bureaucrat deciding for me that I can either have a Blackberry phone or nothing so in that respect selling off the retail division of Telstra would have been fine. Of course what actually happened is that they sold off the whole lot in one go and dumped a vertically integrate monopoly slap bang into the middle of the private sector and threw everything out of balance.

Fast forward to now and NBNCo has had to buy back the rights to run their fiber through Telstra's ducts and pits.

If NBNCo were to be privatised later, we the taxpayers wouldn't get much benefit. We'd get a huge one-off cash windfall, but the NBNCo is going to be run at a very small profit (about 7%) for the shareholders (currently the government is the only shareholder) and that very small profit wouldn't be large enough for a commercial operator that is duty-bound to make the maximum return possible for it's (private) shareholders. To avoid a private operator just coming in and jacking up prices across the board, the only way to privatise NBNCo would be to regulate the heck out of it and we'd be likely to see the same sort of Sol Trujillo-era fights that Telstra had with the government over what the private operator is allowed to do and how much money it is "permitted" to make.

The only reason someone would be stupid enough to privatise it is if:

(a) They needed (or just wanted) to "cash in" and get a huge windfall from the proceeds of the sale, or

(b) Their political philosophy requires that government assets be sold, regardless of the circumstances.

Perhaps if the government wanted to access some of their equity in the NBN they could issue bonds backed by NBNCo revenue (say, pay out 5% of the 7% return and still pick up 2% in cash), but generally, no, there wouldn't be much benefit to anyone is selling it off. It would be a dud buy for any private operator that could actually afford to buy it, it wouldn't be particularly great for the government and it wouldn't create any benefits for resellers or consumers that couldn't be achieved under the current government-owned enterprise model that exists now.

 

Wow, this is an interesting thread to read back over 8 years after the fact!

 

The NBN was always necessary , Labour’s FTTP was a no brainer but the Libs stuffed it up bigtime and now are back pedaling to stop us from having a third world system. The FTTN was always going to leave users left behind the rest of the world.

Some posters crying it is not needed and should not be forced on the public.
If that attitude was maintained we would still be driving from melbourne to Sydney on gravel roads.

 

Oh dear