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Raising Doubts About Australia's Broadband Upgrade Plan

Posted by timothy on from the doubt-doubt-doubt dept.

RcK writes "In addition to the rising controversy of the possible Australian version of the Great Firewall Of China already mentioned several times of late here on Slashdot; the viability of the proposed AU$5Billion internet infrastructure upgrade promised by the Federal Government during their 2007 election campaign is under fire. The MD of arguably Australia's leading internet company, iinet, has branded the proposal a waste of taxpayers money. Steve Ballmer, during his current Australian visit, has also weighed in on the topic and diplomatically indicated that Australia should get on with the job. Much of the current criticism appears to surround the likelihood of people in remote areas being left out of the proposed plan. Ironically, where I lived previously (remote town in central Aus — nearest town over 400km away) everyone had, at the absolute least, subsidized satellite internet, and most had ADSL. In my case a flawless 512k connection for ~4years. However, I now live 5 minutes from the center of a capital city and due to archaic telephone infrastructure cannot get ADSL, and even line noise is too great for dialup!" Today's front page at Whirlpool Broadband News also features several articles relating to the saga.

3 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 3, Insightful

    People are still paying attention to Steve Ballmer???

    1. Re:Huh? by Idiomatick · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Steve balmer if you RTFA says highspeed internet is a good thing, he says that the future of computing is online. And he says 21mbps wireless is fucking awesome. All of these things /. agrees with. Try not to trash the guy when he's not throwing chairs thats just flaming.

  2. Re:Nonsense. by Laser_iCE · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well you obviously didn't read the rest of my post when I clearly pointed out:

    Not saying that Australia is alone in any of these aspects

    The trouble is, I see a lot of kids who say they know a lot about technology, they're interested in gadgets and high tech gear, but when it comes down to actually being able to google for something, or to trouble shoot software when an unexpected error occurs, or even something as simple as going through the options in a program to see what you can change/customize -- these sort of things are beyond the average Australian. Don't be naive and believe that the rest of the country who loves only sports and hot women, are like your friends who enjoy IT and are IT savvy. I don't want to burst your bubble, but a lot of Australians are very shallow, and generally very "sheepish".

    Don't get me wrong, I want to see this country thrive and strive with it's IT industry just as much as you do, but it only takes 5 minutes to step into any Government workplace to realise that most of them have no clue beyond checking emails in Outlook and reading news sites in Internet Explorer.