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."

Murdoch got what he wanted...

[Pav]

After abusing his control of Australian media [businessinsider.com.au] Murdoch got what he wanted - no NBN to challenge his cable interests.

One Step Forward ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:In between.

[Pav]

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 [dailytech.com] for software.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: Not sure which is news...

[rtb61]

I assume you mean they are making the workplace untenable because they legislate safe working conditions, holiday and sick pay (quality of life issues), workers compensation for injuries caused by work, a living wage, how fucking dare they. Workers are there to be ruthlessly exploited, paid only enough not to starve cents\hour, when they are sick or injured tossed on a trash pile no different to a broken machine and be subject to verbal and physical abuse of the masters at a whim, as for paid time of the shear insanity of the idea.

Australia's NBN is being screwed up on purposed at the instruction of Rupert Murdoch and News corporation as straight up repayment for biased election propaganda masquerading as news. They haven't done nothing yet except talk about discussing the idea of designing an alternate system and, come up with a range of blatant bullshit to blame it all on the previous government. They have straight up stalled the NBN for months already and that is the sole goal and already indicated nothing absolutely nothing at all will actually be done about doing any NBN work until 2015. They haven't even designed the alternate hodgepodge network yet.