Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 12 August 2010 12:34
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Just days after the Coalition injected fiscal sanity into the NBN debate, Senator Stephen Conroy and PM Julia Gillard have “launched” the NBN in Tasmania and have said that the NBN Co’s Mike Quigley only yesterday notified Senator Conroy that the NBN would have its speeds boosted to 1Gbps, 10 times faster than the previously promised 100Mbps speeds, in what is the most desperate pre-election spin yet.
OPINION: Well, what a mess we have over the National Broadband Network. From Kevin Rudd’s original promise of a 12Mbps $4.7b NBN to the 100Mbps $43b NBN metamorphosis, Labor has now decided to boost the speed of the NBN to 1Gbps.
Well, actually, the NBN Co says it will do it, even though the NBN Co mentioned some time ago that the NBN would be upgradeable to this faster speed in the future, but as the NBN Co is effectively a government monopoly, it’s hard to believe Senator Stephen Conroy’s claim, repeated three times in the press conference, that he only heard about the 1Gbps upgrade from the NBN Co’s Mike Quigley yesterday.
Of course, having a 100Mbps or 1Gbps NBN doesn’t actually help Australians really download information from overseas any faster if the undersea cables connecting us to the rest of the world aren’t also expanded, transferring any bottleneck from the landline to the sea, with the NBN not promising to do anything about our actual international connectivity.
Sure, it will help doctors send high-resolution X-rays between one office and another within Australia, if doctors are willing to make tricky diagnoses electronically and their insurance companies are happy with it, something IT Executive Sean Kaye talked about in his article,
reprinted here in iTWire.
Indeed, Kaye’s article makes a lot of brilliant points – the debt we are racking up, the craziness over wanting an NBN for education simply so the video being sent comes through at higher resolution and more.
The thing is, in the face of an affordable plan from the Coalition which emphasises fiscal prudence while finally filling in the rural and regional blackspots that would have been filled in by now had the Labor government not cancelled the Coalition’s OPEL plan, the Labor party has panicked.
It is now offering 1Gbps. There is no indication what this upgrade will cost. It will cost something – previously only 100Mbps equipment was going to be connected to those fibre optical cables. Now we need more capable equipment.
What’s wrong with paying off some of Australia’s massive debt (no matter how much “smaller” that debt is compared with the rest of the world) and, as Kaye suggests, starting construction of any NBN in a couple of years time? Or a couple of years after that?
Continued on page two, please read on!
