Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
- How secure is the network? Does it protect users from online fraud, identity theft and other online criminal behaviour?
- What provisions are there to restore service quickly in the event of a service interruption?
- Who is paying for the service, and how much is it expected to cost?
- Will advertising really be enough to pay for the service, and what kind of sacrifices will we have to make to our Internet experience to see the ads that will pay for the service?
- What protections will the government make against pirates using the network to download copyright protected software and digital media, or using the network to upload and share such materials with others?
- Will the government be individually monitoring users on the network?
- What guarantees can the government give to companies that the network is reliable and secure, seeing as it wants to make NSW more attractive for expanding or new businesses?
- What service provisions, help desks or other support numbers are available should users have difficulty connecting to the network?
- What will the government do if the network is flooded by freeloaders who overload the network, slowing it down tremendously and making it more painful to use as time goes by?
- What protections is the government taking to ensure its network is not a conduit for spammers, illegal bot network operators or other illegal online behaviour that will try to be masked via someone using a brand new laptop computer with no identifying materials on it who is connecting to the free wireless network?
- What will the government do if existing ISPs and Australia’s Internet Industry Association protest against this action? No such protests have yet taken place and we have no idea of their intentions. But as their businesses will be materially affected by this unilateral government action, we can only but wonder.
A lot of questions need to be answered about this wireless network, otherwise it could easily become a clogged, congested, insecure network that no individual or business in their right mind would want to risk using.
Governments often have grand plans, but often don’t follow through properly or at all.
Before we can make any final judgement, we need to see more detail, but when was the last time you really had any faith in the never ending stream of whiz-bang announcements and schemes that governments dream up?
The NSW Government should forget about becoming a provider of free ISP services and concentrate on being a good government that looks after the roads, the healthcare system, law and order and delivering on existing promises.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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