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AU National Broadband Network Signs $11 Billion Deal With Telstra
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian government has signed an $11 billion deal with the country's largest telco, Telstra, to acquire the telco's physical infrastructure and migrate customers to the National Broadband Network. The NBN is a 100Mbps open access fiber network that will be rolled out to 94% of the Australian population, with wireless and satellite to cover the remainder. The deal marks a large step forward for the new network, as without a deal to bring Telstra's customers onboard, the NBN's viability was in question."
Everyone knows wallabies love to eat fiber
If this was a country other than Australia I'd think it was awesome. Now this just seems as a way to further invade the internet lives of their citizens. I sure hope people can still buy private internet, but I doubt they'll be able to.
Maybe now the Australian people won't get fucked by Telstra any longer. Seriously, that's got to be one of THE worst ISPs I've seen people use.
I've had more stable video conference calls on a 56k dialup.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
NBN is a private company funded by the government for now. Once it's up and running, the government will cut and run like with everything else. Trust me, this has very little to do with censorship.
For anyone truly concerned, they never tested any of their ISP-level filtering shit on the fibre networks, because they know it'll fuck up under that load. If anything, the NBN will make any further censorship proposals go away... for now.
Disagree != mod troll.
Australia is currently spearheading innovation in Western censorship and control. Think of it like MSDN for governments.
4. Profit! (for the Telstra shareholders)
Well it would be about time for them
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This will save the government billions of dollars in trench digging and pole construction. This is a great sign that the NBN won't be scrapped by any upcoming parties.
On the other hand since the NBN is essentially going to either make Telstra's service a niche product or drive the company into bankruptcy, you'd think they'd just nationalize their assets anyways. But at least this way the shareholders, most of which are common Australian families, will get something out of it.
The Telstra-NBN deal illustrates how the telecom industry should be restructured.
In the US, recent policy has moved in exactly the opposite direction, towards more vertical integration, so the telephone companies, who own wires built with monopoly money, don't have to let competing ISPs use them at all. They only have to let competitive phone companies (CLECs) use them under certain circumstances, which are shrinking; this basically is limited to old copper wire in urban areas and town centers.
A "LoopCo" would be a company that owns the outside wire and leases it equally to all comers, building fiber for all who want to rent it, even cable. One fiber plant is a lot easier to afford than two or three. The original NBN plan would have built a new fiber plant to compete with Telstra; as customers moved off of Telstra's old copper network, Telstra would have lost money. Telstra blinked: They're selling their existing plant to NBN, so that they will be the biggest wholesale customer, not a competitor. Telstra wins: They get to use the new network, and get paid A$11B for their old wire. The country wins: They get NBN's new fiber, and don't have to fight Telstra all the way, or pay twice.
The Bells in the US do not see it this way. Nor does the FCC, which is squarely in their pocket. Expect the US to fall farther and farther behind, as the farce called "National Broadband Plan" leads to more of the same, just with higher taxes to subsidize CenturyTel, TDS, and other rural subsidy whores who can use the subsidy money to put local wireless ISPs, who are not eligible for subsidies (only one subsidy recipient in a given place - it's literally a monopoly fund) out of business.
Provision of last-mile services are not commercially viable, virtually every network of this type has been built with government funds.. If such a network comes under private ownership it will always be a monopoly because it isn't commercially viable to build any competing infrastructure.
Such infrastructure should always have remained controlled by a non profit wholesale provider, and let third parties brand and offer services to end users.
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Seems like every day there's a story about AT&T, Verizon, "cable" and "digital switchovers". It's just one country, right?
"The NBN is a 100Mbps open access fiber network that will be rolled out to 94% of the Australian population"
Currently, the plan is only 90% coverage with fibre, although the recent report by KPMS suggested they increase that to 92%. I believe the 94% is the current (claimed) Telstra ADSL coverage.
Whats the use of an encrypted connection when you're being mass-MITMed by the very lines you're going through?
Avoiding MITM attacks is one of the primary design features of SSL / TLS. Unless the government has control of a root cert authority in your browser they can't MITM you without you getting at least a warning. Of course, I wouldn't put it past them to legislate that all browsers distributed in Austraila must ship an "Australian Government" root cert and then the game will be up ...
No new pipes to the US, no competitive data rates, held back adsl 2, count data use up and down ect.
Labor could have done this right with clean new equipment, new telcos and worlds best practice.
Now we have the same old rust belt tech grafted on.
The same crushed ducts, digital loop carrier DLC protecting telco leaders getting rehabilitated with public funding.
The only effort put into national networking was to stifle, silence and suppress any talk of one.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The National Broadband Network (NBN) is a Layer-2 wholesale network; your IP carriage (or whatever else is run over the fibre) is provided by your retailer, who buy access to the layer 2 wholesale network from NBN Co., the government-owned company that is building and administering the network.
I would think that litigation for copyright violations etc would then be more likely to fall on the retailer, who has a direct relationship with the end user; as the wholesaler, NBN Co. does not.
21 MilliMetres?
I think you mean 22 Million people.
Just to clarify, Australia is 7,617,930 km2 whilst the continental United states is 8,080,464.25 km2. We are almost as big as 48 of your states put together.
And we are getting better Internet infrastructure (how are those local monopolies working out, our regulation is great) not to mention health care, education and so forth.
No point in having area a population statistics when talking about services.
Where does it say this?
Nowhere?
Perhaps you made it up to justify your poorly thought out rant.
The broadband will not be nationalised, The government is building the infrastructure and this will be leased to all private telco's. It's not like this was the NBN's stated goal from the word go, nor has it changed. Australia has not had a government owned telco in over 15 years. this is exactly like state owned powerlines, anyone can lease them.
And you're damned right, when the NBN is a success, European governments will follow suit, however the US will still be beholden to private corporations who want tax money to maintain the status quo. Let us know how that works out for you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.