Australia’s NBN and FttN – fibre to the nowhere?

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Friday, 08 August 2008

Page 2 of 3 As expected, the Federal Opposition hasn’t been kind to the Government in its latest release about the National Broadband Network, calling the whole process “shambolic and secretive”. Here, Shadow Minister for Broadband, Bruce Billson, says Prime Minister Rudd is keeping quite to avoid “bad publicity about failing to deliver.” The Government is also accused of focusing on other issues, while dealing with “several broken deadline promises and estimates of staggering cost blow-outs” while not being able to “explain what taxpayers will actually get for their $4.7 billion.” There’s also criticism that the Government scrapped the OPEL WiMAX broadband plan without a timely replacement (given the NBN is expected to take 5 years to build) which has left people in rural and regional Australia suffering the tyranny of time passing by with no action. Billson says: “The big problem for Labor is it based its broadband promise on an election sound bite, with no sound public policy to back it up. For Senator Conroy, shifting deadlines and dodging scrutiny will not fix a fundamentally flawed process.” Meanwhile, Australian telecommunications analyst Paul Budde says in his latest media release (not yet linked to on his website) that the FttN process is “already out of date”. Budde says that governments overseas are “starting to heavily invest in FttH” while Australia still sees “history repeating” with an “absence of decision-making” and ongoing delays. Budde explains that this all happened before in “the early days of broadband, then with Local Loop Unbundling and ADSL2+” and that we are making things far too complex. Continued on page 3. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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