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Transparency Required For $37 Billion Aussie Broadband Deal
destinyland writes "Freedom of Information Laws have been successfully extended to Australia's $37.5 billion broadband internet project — a 100 mbps fiber network covering 94% of the Australian population. The massive National Broadband Network had originally been classified as exempt from Australia's Freedom of Information laws, which Australia's goverment argued would impose 'a competitive disadvantage' on its operating company. The Opposition and Green parties pointed out that freedom of information was essential, since the NBN Company would be operating as an internet monopoly."
...they will manage to stuff up at some stage. I have no doubts that this will exceed the $37.5 billion allocated. Seriously, when was the last an Australian government (state or federal) has managed to maintain their promises on costs of any project.
Bah. The opposition have been running a ridiculous scare campaign to try and convince people that its a terrible idea and instead the government should be rolling out 4G wireless as the new "next generation" broadband.
Never mind that 4G is slower than the current ADSL2+ network.
And the bit about a monopoly is ridiculous. The current copper network is owned as a monopoly by Telstra who are proving to be deeply anti-competitive compared to when it was government owned . If your going to do a monopoly, let the govt run it so that it wont have an anti-competitive profit motive. Then let the commercials offer alternatives. This is the current plan.
The conservatives would block their own assholes if they believed labor had invented them.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
...without transparency, how are the lasers going to shine over the optical fiber?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The Australian Government is now fully engaged in the Fascist Business Model like the USA, hence the contempt for people policies. The Commonwealth of Australia is a US Securities Exchange listed company, prospectus n all. Look it up.
One the one side transparency should be part of every major infrastructure project. It provides a way to judge the government on how well it's doing spending money rather than squandering it on red tape and poorly worded contracts. Knowing this government it will cost more than the $37bn they projected.
On the other hand the whole quest for transparency is coming from the opposition as they are desperately looking for any excuse to try and sink this project. Their vision of the future is some magical wireless that apparently will break the laws of physics or something and will provide this speed to all Australians without infrastructure costs. Oh and rather than a government funded project they will achieve this simply handing billions to Telstra our biggest government funded monopoly, and also the ISP with the poorest pricing models in the country. This is also disappointing as the opposition communications minister is the only one really qualified for the title, but he also seems to be in magical wireless land.
If the opposition manage to sink this project as a result of somehow convincing the greens and independents that it is not worthwhile as a result of this information, I'm going to be pissed.
Being at home above the equator, I'm confused by the article's reference to "material relating to confidential commercial information". Supposedly, such information could and should be protected from disclosure.
But why does the government need to have trade secrets along with the usual military and diplomatic embargo on information? Dictators and their cronies might think it's okay to run a government for profit, but my understanding of democratic government is that, at best, it shouldn't lose money ("balanced budget"). Fees are charged for paperwork and the like so the government can pay its employees or buy the raw materials it needs to render its services.
Seriously
they are trying to derail the NBN and trust me this is the ONLY way australia is not going to be a backwater in 5 year (more than it is now)
they are nuts first they claim that wireless is speedier than fibre
(what do they think forms the uplinks from the base stations....)
then they claim its not value for money
(frankly the amount of bandwidth in australia is worth 100 billion but they wont see that as they dont depend on the internet for anything since right now it's so slow)
if you want to know what a society can do with lots of bandwidth go to sweden
australia needs something like NBN FAST and the politicians should stop playing games !!!!
regards
John Jones
It's actually a 1 Gbps FTTH network to 93% of the population, fixed wireless a further to 4% of the population and satellite to the rest. Perhaps the opposition could use FOI laws to get there facts correct.
> since the NBN Company would be operating as an internet monopoly
This is the single worst possible way to provide I service.
The Oz Government is both stupid and evil.
I say evil because I bet the fact that the money all comes from tax so this is a State owned company will play no small part in the Australian Governments deep packet inspection monitoring. If they tried to impose that on a private commerical company, they'd be fought tooth and nail, because of the costs and because it discourages customers. If they impose it on a State owned company... who's going to argue. The company doesn't mind, because it knows it will always be bailed out with tax money if things go pear shaped (otherwise the State looks bloody idiotic for spending 37.5 billion on a failure) and maybe now it will be tax payers money now which installs the hardware.
The stated reasons for the effort to avoid FOI do not add up - not given that other State owned companies are under FOI. There's a good reason and there's a real reason. I bet the Government would love it if this company could secretly act upon State imposed monitoring requirements. Then they could monitor everything they'd like - *no one would know*.
WHY is one group of people taking money from everyone and then using it to place them under survelliance?
Oz is now well and truly off my list of places to live.
The issue isn't with the NBN being awesome and cool, it's about ROI, and the fact that their is none. Having 1GBps network to the middle of nowhere isn't going to do any good. If it was commercially viable, a private company would have already done it, and the labor party has already been buying votes by promising regional towns first roll out of the NBN, where there is absolutly no ROI or economies of scale.
I would support the NBN if it only applied to major population centers only, ie, capital cities. Improve regional with wireless, not rewiring every street where the ROI will be next to nothing. Even in the capital cities it will be next to nothing, there is not going to be any huge increase to Australia's economy with the NBN, we're not going to become a hosting/cloud hub of the world simply due to latency. We'll create a super fast network for services in Australia only, a country of 22 million with a network which will never have any good ROI for the public money spent. The reason these sort of networks work so well in South Korea / Japan / Singapore is because they are small land masses with very high density populations. Australia has the land mass of the USA with a 20th of the population.
The project will likely take 5 or more years to complete.
I remember having 4mbps/512kbps ADSL line 5 years ago and there is no way i would call that "usable" today.
I've had 150mbps/100mbps cable for a year now, this seems fine at the moment but in 5 years? considering how technology keeps on advancing and using up more-and-more bandwidth i really doubt there will be that many users for 100mbps net in 5 years.
In my opinion they should take the money, invest it in backbone networks and let local telco's compete on rented cables (take Stockholm for example, similar scenario resulted in 4$/mo 100mbps net for the whole city 2 years ago)
Thing is, you're one of the VERY lucky ones. I would kill for your speeds. I live 3 km from the CBD of Canberra and the fastest speed I can obtain, via any means, is ~6Mbit (downstream). Relatives of mine in Brisbane are in a similar situation: they live in a central, relatively affluent suburb, but due to their distance from the exchange get poor speeds. 6Mbit is by no means 'terrible' - it's fine for gaming and everyday usage. But more will be needed in the very near future (and I'd love faster upload speeds than the 1 Mbit I get now ... uploading a roll of photos to Flickr takes hours!)
Virtually anywhere that doesn't have cable (i.e. everywhere other than select areas of Syd/Mel/Bris) or isn't very close to the exchange has rubbish speeds. Can't wait for faster speeds to be available. Frankly I don't care if it's the NBN or a private company or aliens from outer space that provide it, I just want it :P
completely at odds with every other facet of an increasingly authoritarian Austrailian government. I've been meaning to look into why the land down under has taken this sudden lurch to the hard right; does it all go back to the Bali bombing? Then again, why should I assume Austrailia would be free of the same, hate-mongering, ignorant contagion that is afflicting the US.
I want someone to come along and kill the bandwidth caps in this country... The 'unlimited' we have now is pure B.S. marketing that ends up getting shaped like a 300 baud modem. I just came back from a 2-week trip to Korea where I downloaded 850 gigs in that short time.
Optics don't short out under water.
100 mbps was WAY too slow even for the early years of the Internet! In the late nineties most of the people getting online had at least a 56 kbps modem, that is 560,000 times faster than 100 mbps.
Now, 100 Mbps, that's a different story. Most people have internet access in the vicinities of 10 Mbps, so most people would consider 100 Mbps very fast now, but I agree that our perception will likely be very different in just a few years..
Don't be rediculous. It's allus then.
Thing is, Korea is a country where most content people demand is hosted domestically. ISPs can reach a much larger percentage of the demanded hosts without crossing to transit or peering networks. Australia OTOH is a very unusual beast in the world of provisioning internet: it's English-speaking, but far from where most English speaking content is hosted (North America, and to a lesser extent the UK). Something like 90% of traffic is international. Few other countries on earth have that pattern of demand (NZ and South Africa do, and they are capped worse than we are). But for places like Japan, Korea, or even the US for that matter, international traffic demand for residential ISPs is pretty low.
Given that reserving capacity on undersea cables is relatively expensive for ISPs, it is unlikely that Australia will see an end to data caps in the near term. It really is in a rather unique situation of being physically large, far from everywhere (particularly from where the content is we want is hosted), and having a low population.
That is not to excuse the situation though - I agree it'd be nice to get rid of the caps. And I think we are moving in that direction fairly quickly. We now have 1GB+ plans available (and some genuinely unlimited plans such as TPGs, although only available in certain areas). So the situation is MUCH better than it was even a year or two ago. I can easily see unlimited or multi-terabyte-cap plans becoming the norm within the next 5-10 years.
Although frankly, 95% of users won't really notice. The proportion of customers that consume more than even 100GB/month is tiny. Hell, I live on the Internet 24/7 and I only use ~30GB/month (although I do use a fair chunk of my ISPs unmetered content, so if you included that it'd be more like 50-60GB). The thing that will really change this is widespread adoption of IPTV (which I feel is going to happen) ... although ISPs that offer it now count IPTV as unmetered traffic anyway so it's a moot point...
The Opposition is playing kow-tow to big media interests. They want to derail the debate on broadband using whatever lies and misinformation necessary to convince the public to drop support for it. The Murdochs and Packers know all too well that if the NBN was to become a reality, then TV and their media companies would be first to take a huge hit.
Already they have been running articles in their respective outlets attempting to bash the debate around the NBN. We have Macolm Turbull who seems to think that the internet can be routed over 4G wireless. Of course, the pollies and gThe quality of debate in the mass media is being stymied.