Transparency Required For $37 Billion Aussie Broadband Deal 62
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."
Knowing the Australian government... (Score:2, Insightful)
Useless posturing by the conservatives. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Useless posturing by the conservatives. (Score:5, Insightful)
Opposition and Green parties scare mongers ! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
No ROI has been done for this network.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.