Pacnet CEO believes NBN a waste of money

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 13:14

Business IT - Networking

As Asian telecoms service provider Pacnet announces its intention to list on the NASDAQ in 2010, the company's CEO has derided the NBN as commercially unviable and believes the money would be better spent on a high bandwidth submarine cable between Australia and the US.

According to Pacnet CEO William Barney, the Australian Government, like other governments around the world, does not really have much idea about how to make the NBN economically viable.

"I think it's very fluid right now as they're trying to figure out how to build a fibre network that brings low cost content to the consumer," Barney told iTWire.

"I'm skeptical about whether you can make the economics work in the non urban areas without having a complete government owned loss leading telco because that's essentially what you did in the old days.

"You can't put that in the hands of the private sector because no one will make money doing that. The farmer 100 miles outside of Melbourne is not going to pay you 1000 bucks a month for broadband and that's essentially what it cost you to build it to him."

Any NBN has got to be government owned and tax payer funded, according to Barney.

"It's the rich funding the poor in many ways, with your urban population funding your rural population."

Barney believes there is a much better way to use tax payer funds to improve the broadband experience for Australian consumers.

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