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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.
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.
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
But why does the government need to have trade secrets along with the usual military and diplomatic embargo on information?
Because it's an investment that they are determined is a good idea, but it's very hard to prove there will be enough of an economic return. Open up the accounts and they'll get assaulted from all sides -- the Liberal party complaining about the debt burden, the Telcos complaining about unfair competition, etc etc. Realistically, the NBN is being funded in the hope that having a western English-speaking country with almost universal fast broadband access, companies will choose to deploy here first, found the company here, and turn technology from a big net import to a big net export as things deployed here first get re-exported around the world. As a technologist, I think it's a good bet, but it is one that is darned hard to prove in a business case -- expose it and the polticial flak from taking a punt with $40bn will sink the project and condemn Australia to continue importing most of its technology. At the moment, even most things that are invented here are incorporated in the US because that's the market the founders want to build a business in -- 10 times the size of Australia and with comparable infrastructure. So even if we invent it, it usually still ends up as a foreign company selling technology to Australia, and a balance of trade problem, as the US-incorporated company does the bulk of its hiring in the US. We need to change that, and making it attractive to found the next generation of technology companies here -- making Australia the first market a founding start-up will target, and consequently where they will incorporate -- is a good way to start.
In short, my opinion is that it's a great bet because even if worst comes to worst, you still end up with a useful utility. But if the bet pays off, you get both a useful utility and growth and diversification in the economy. But you'd never get that past an opposition politician or a businessman with a vested interest in it failing.
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)