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AU National Broadband Network Signs $11 Billion Deal With Telstra

Posted by Soulskill on from the going-for-the-gusto dept.

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."

6 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. This will not end well by mrsteveman1 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Everyone knows wallabies love to eat fiber

  2. Yeah... by kindups · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Yeah... by smash · · Score: 4, Informative

      All the NBN does is roll out the fibre for use by whatever isp or telco (they purchase/lease it off the government). The service provision is separated from the infrastructure.

      --
      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
  3. Good by Khyber · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  4. FUD. by bbqsrc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  5. This is Great by sonicmerlin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.