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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."
After abusing his control of Australian media Murdoch got what he wanted - no NBN to challenge his cable interests.
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.
I know someone who works for an Australian company. They put in a tender for part of the NBN project but IBM won the contract at almost twice the price. IBM then subcontracted the work back to the Australian company. It's strange - Australians seem to underestimate the abilities of their own technical community, and as slaves to community perception Australian governments are particularly bad for this bias. It seems to be part of the national psyche that we're only about agriculture and mining, and local tech comes a poor second to overseas offerings. It's no wonder we're judged an easy mark and regularly overcharged for software.
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.
I've seen better. A company put in a bid for some subcontracting work, only to realise it was a job that they already subcontracted out to a subcontractor. Australian Government purchasing is so inefficient, subcontracting loops can even form.
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.