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Australia's National Broadband Network Downgraded
RobHart writes "Following election promises to create a 'better, cheaper, sooner' National Broadband Network (NBN), the new Australian government has reneged, announcing instead the NBN will cost $12bn more and take four years longer. The critical change is that the new network is based on Telstra's aging and unreliable copper network rather than fiber to the home, as has already been delivered during the NBN roll out to date."
So the underlined text is completely the opposite. it will take less time and cost 20 billion less.
However id prefer it took longer, cost more but was FIBER TO THE HOME and not copper dsl
SLAHSHDOT YOU ARE HURTING US NERDS IN AUS COME ON PLEASE COMPLAIN PROPERLY
After abusing his control of Australian media Murdoch got what he wanted - no NBN to challenge his cable interests.
The answer lies in between. Politicians promise large projects and underestimate their cost. They hire the lowest bidder, and the talent running the project is not cream of the crop because that would cost more. The government also has very little competition for large scale projects, so if the project isn't going well, we can't exactly bring in someone else to take it over, like an individual would if a plumber they hired was incompetent.
Public-Private Partnerships seem to work address a lot of these issues. Expect to see more of them in the future.
One step forward and three steps back.
Continued investment in poor and aging infrastructure is not smart. Doing it at a greater expense is criminal. This should come at the expense of the jobs of the hacks who made these decisions.
While the parent here is certainly right about government projects, it's hard not to imagine that the Australian government didn't know this was coming from day one.
Ten minutes' study of Australia's geography and population can tell you that this would have been one of the lowest bang-for-the-buck national projects imaginable. Australia is the opposite of South Korea in this respect - it's a massive place with low population density. If running fiber all over it were easy, it would've been done by now.
It is telling that they didn't just say 'sorry, this will take a little longer' but rather 'this will take longer, cost more, and we're not even going to try to deliver what we promised.'
I am a free-market guy in general, but this is really tough. The free market can only 'sort it out' if the cost/benefit works out. I don't think it's even close here. The free market solution for a problem like Australia's is not 'let a bunch of companies bid on a hugely expensive monopoly project' but reward them with an innovative solution - come up with something that doesn't require them to dig up a whole continent to plug in towns of 1,000 people.
The plutocrats prevailed.
Telstra snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and have not only managed to force everyone to pay (again) for their decaying copper network that they themselves ran into the ground, they've now weedled their white-shoe conservative mates in Canberra into letting them set up a tollroad for all Australians far into the future.
And Murdoch and his evil empire gets to maintain his complete and utter dominance of Australian TV, newspapers and cable.
Win-win-win all round for all the white shoe tory criminals.
it seems like it was just days ago when they said they couldn't run fiber to the home and were going to use copper to the home:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/05/2025245/australias-44b-broadband-network-may-settle-for-fiber-near-the-home
What are they downgrading to now? A piece of string to the house?
The whole point of the NBN is that it's a government chartered corporation that leases access to everyone.
It was never about the "free-market".
Instead, the idea was to create a competitive market, on a government built foundation instead of the existing private monopoly/oligopoly.
Infrastructure investments are almost always worth it, even if the price explodes.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Australia is the opposite of South Korea in this respect - it's a massive place with low population density.
Australia's a bit deceptive in this... there are massive areas where no one lives, which would not need any connections. I guess it's a little like Canada, in a way. If you just take the land area, and divide by the population, you get big numbers. However, those numbers aren't all that useful in figuring out how costly it would be to get broadband to a certain percentage of the population, since no one lives in 90% of the area.
Also, South Korea is only a little bit smaller than England, with a little bit smaller population. England's broadband is not close to South Korea, despite being a first world western nation.
Our telephone monopoly has been doing very little other than sitting on what they have since 1996. There is no "free market" here. There is only the monopoly that wins by doing nothing apart from stopping any other competition cropping up or a government doing an end run around that monopoly.
Yes I need to grow up because I feel the need to not watch everything this nation once produced get offshored because the Unions STEAL. Yes STEAL. Whilst using the 'poor downtrodden worker' excuse to do so. We cannot muscle companies around just because we can. And in this case their is no need to look out for the little guy. Scrapping minimum wage is a bullshit statement towards me because your pulling my argument to an extreme rightist view just because you think you're cool for doing it.
Listen, I'm not wagering the Libs are any better. But I certainly wont overlook the atrocity we called the ALP and think for ANNNY second that Julia the massiah Gillard was any better. She's under investigation by the Victorian Police for these sorts of reasons. Union slush funds she used to renovate her house. This 'was' our leader?
My guess is your a younger person than me. Perhaps just out of uni and was fed all this bullshit while serving time at our nation's 'Social Sausage Machine'. As the saying goes. If you're under 30 and not vote Labor you have no heart. If youre over 30 and vote Labor. Then you're a fucking idiot.
I give it two years at the most before you understand that I am not delusional, unless you choose to live under a rock.
Either way the NBN is dead and all that's left is for Ziggy and his mates to suck the corpse dry and blame it on Labor. Expect strange financial adventures in China that fail for no clear reason but result in a lot of money vanishing to nowhere that people can follow. That's one common way to launder public money when something goes semi-private. Telstra did it, state owned power utilities did it, and since Ziggy has form he's likely to do it again to what's left of the NBN. Expect the bones to be given to Telstra for either nothing or a fire sale price.
Australian politics is easy to understand. Labor go into debt to build infrastructure and the Libs have unneeded fire sales of the infrastructure before it has a chance to make a return then blame that on Labor. After the Libs sit on their arses doing nothing useful for a few years and the blame wears off enough people get pissed off to put Labor back in and the cycle continues. The Nats are mostly irrelevant, even in Queensland. Kevin Rudd showed that the Unions were mostly irrelevant, even in Labor, so you need to look for something else to blame.
Currently we are in the blame and selloff part of the cycle which is why we are seeing so much money getting wasted on pointless inquiries as if the Libs don't understand that they have won and there's no reason to kick a dead horse. The insulation scheme were dodgy bastards broke the rules and sent untrained kids to die was how many years ago - and what's the point of an inquiry to say to Labor "you should have stopped the dodgy bastards from breaking the rules"? Meanwhile the Libs want less tight workplace regulations while trying to insist Labor should have had draconian controls on the small businesses operating on the insulation scheme. It's all about throwing mud around since they don't really want such a nanny state.