No dude. The government has to at the very least try and deliver the same quality of service to all Australians regardless of location. Otherwise rural Aussies should pay less tax. Hell, maybe they should secede and let the city slickers try and feed themselves then they can find out just how important farmland and mining is and maybe they can work out how rural Australia is subsidising capital city Australia?
It would have cost more for the NBNCo to build their own ducts. The deal with Telstra saved billions of dollars. The public paid for the telephone network then the public sold the telephone network. The public can't have it's cake an eat it too. The existing infrastructure is 70 years old and sucks, which is the reason for building the NBN in the first place. The customers aren't being "bought" by the NBNCo because the NBNCo is wholesale only. The customers are being transferred from the copper and coaxial networks to the fiber network. The NBN will "gain" a certain number of people using the fiber network but these people will remain customers of their existing telco provider. Yes, it was.
Of course they should pay less tax. Or maybe we could have a MyGovernment web site to rate the performance of government in every community and link politicians salaries to the value received by their communities. And then we could have the Fair Urban Country and Community Commission (FUCCC) to regulate the website and political salaries, with bonuses received for every 5th percentile performance above the median community measure of wealth redistributed by their government. Of course we would need the Holistic Environmental Legislative Levy to complemement the FUCCC. To be known as the FUCCC 'n HELL model for sustainable governance. :lol:
I agree to a point. Spending should not be limited to the cities. QLD state government is a classic example of poor budget allocation. All of our taxes go straight down into the SE corner whilst the rest of us can't even get decent roads to drive on, yet it is the mining industry that is funding all their unsustainable projects! I currently live in an outback town, 900km from the nearest city and 500km from the nearest croc infested coastline. We have adsl 2 out here nowdays, and personally I couldnt care less for an upgrade - I certainly wouldn't pay more for it and I am a relatively high volume user. I disagree entirely with providing high speed broadband to everyone - it is uneconomical for our large land mass - population and location must have some bearing on decisions. Lets also not forget that the telecommunications industry is blatantly ripping us off in Australia - wireless interenet should not be near as expensive as we are getting charged. The NBN is one of the most horrid wastes of taxpayer dollars in recent memory. The decision to run fibre to every possible home was a decision that was made without proper analysis of technology or the application. Only businesses can truly lay claim to obtaining real advantages from fibre - it will not be remotely necessary for residential uses for another decade. Despite what gamers and cyber nerds will whine, they do not need fibre yet. The government should have provided it only to business areas in cities and regional centres of large enough population, whilst ensuring that the residential population has sufficient traditional broadband provided that the locality is suitable. Money should have been invested into the development of wireless technologies for isolated regional localities. There are massive leaps to be made in this area and development of the technology could even lead to business opportunities worldwide. Afterall, it is technology that grows an economy and this (along with alternative energy and sustainability technologies) is a great opportunity for this country to develop world leading technologies. By the time the NBN becomes useful, it will be proven to be dated technology for sparcely populated areas and a massive waste of taxpayers dollars at the time. Trouble is, governments these days only care about getting votes to keep their jobs - not the greater interests of the people they kick around and take advantage of.
No. The public paid for the Telecomm infrastracture and the Howard Government renamed it Telstra and sold it, pocketing the profits as a "surplus" of which the Rudd government burnt in cash give aways, overpriced school construction, insulation programmes, real estate CDOs, the NBN, etc. until it had spent the lot. Lets not talk about the need for the Carbon Tax again. No. The legacy infrastructure is already being replaced on a commercial basis with a Fibre/Coaxial Hybrid network, that Telstra is now going to rip up. I am actually on a coaxial connection at my house that is available at 80Mbps if I want it. No. Telstra and Optus are going to be paid for transferring customers. That's the deal. No customers, no money. $24B to construct? Really? That is the first I have ever heard of it.
If you think the centralisation of internet services into the hands of the government is a good and valid thing, then you care not for privacy or the fundamentals of commerce and competition. The whole thing is a speculative venture that the government is sponsoring, which is backed by their ability to coercively extract money from the population, and for which capital is loaned. If the government was not backing this venture, with its taxation ability, there would be not loans and no debt to be guaranteed. If the government wanted to provide better communications to the bush it could just as easily contract out such provisioning to specified areas and nominate service levels. It didn't need an NBN Co to centralise the power and control over network communications. As for the fraud of private/public partnerships . . . well they are a fraud and an excellent example of how the government colludes with its corporate buddies to privatise public space and infrastructure.
I'm hoping no one has mentioned wireless as an alternative to fibre in this NBN debate. If so, haha at you. As much as I would have liked for the NBN to be a major city/metro area only project, I can see that the Government is attempting to spread it as far around the country as possible. This will in turn allow people in cities to decentralize more into the regional areas and continue to have the same core services as major cities. It's too late to be debating about costings of this project though - ugh.
Yeah um, thats what they've been doing with Telstra under the Universal Service Obligation and we've had 14 years of FAIL there since Telstra was privatized. What you're suggesting is actually how things are at the moment and it doesn't work.
Lets list some of the problems with wireless: - Congestion (wireless has limited freq.) - LoS Issues (mountains, valleys etc) - Towers (would need them every 100 metres in dense areas) - Backhaul (would need to fibre anyway)
Why not just use the smoke signals and therefore revert back to the olden days and we don't need to worry about NBN. Win?
Well, I haven't read the entire thread, but it appears to be mainly about the NBN. Apparently wireless is no good, yet here I am sitting here with my portable wireless laptop with a little 3G dongle stuck in my USB, downloading videos of doom and despair at twice the speed I can with my ADSL2+ at home. Yeah, wireless is crap.
jparrie, That's ENOUGH of this independent thought! You will toe the party line and CONFORM! The Politburo has spoken! OC
Wireless will prove to be the best technology for isolated areas a decade from now as it is developed - the government jumped the gun on this project before it was required, and therefore before the right tech was available. As far as decentralizing - that will never happen because they dont spend enough money on critical services - roads and health. Decentralization must begin with the state governements leading the way by taking gov departments out of the capital cities to more suitable regional centres. Start moving departments like NR&M (or whatever they call themselves now) to regional centres where they are more relevant and you create opportunities for private support companies to develop in these areas also. It will have a roll-on effect, but the ball in the gov's court
one thing Labor thinkers dont understand is the market drives innovation and investment. If they keep their meddling hands out of it the market will deliver whats required. Years and years of sticking the nose in where its not needed has led to majority investments going off shore. It aint attractive to invest in infrastructure in Australia, the rules and regulations are forboding. I love my FTTN internet, heck I see 100Mb/s frequently and 5Mb/s on the upload, but do I need it, probably not, ADSL2 was pretty good and wireless is fine for browsing, emails etc
And yet my adsl download speed is generally a sustained 2.1mb/second - three times faster than I get on the telstra 3G network even in good reception areas. Nobody is saying that wireless is crap, but it is not comparable to wired in either throughput or latency at this point in time.
Telstra's monopoly on the infrastructure has been holding back broadband. They should have kept the infrastructure separate from day one rather than relying on regulation of telstra to try and control their monopoly powers.
Trader dan had a brief comment on it. http://traderdannorcini.blogspot.com/2011/07/australian-reserve-bank-director-issues.html