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A comment on How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed.

Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by ClassyJacket on Thursday October 26, 2017 @09:42PM (#15564940)
The tl;dr is that Australia started a fibre-to-the-premises project for the whole country (93% of premises, plus rural 7% on wireless), then a conservative government got in power and decided to deliberately destroy it. To do this, they changed it to fibre-to-the-node (DSL) instead. Instead of gigabit to the home, they're spending more money providing people with connections anywhere between 4mbps and 100 at the absolute most, with no possibility of upgrades. The cost to do this, is, of course, far more money in the long term than installing the fibre. Some people in metropolitan areas will get connected to the existing coaxial network, which is going to have huge contention problems as it's stretched far beyond what it was ever intended for.

It's the biggest trainwreck of an infrastructure project in Australia's history and will set every person and business back for decades, and the blame lies squarely with the Liberal Party.

The current head of the project has gone on record saying that Australians don't want fast internet and wouldn't use it if it was free.

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by aplummer on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:09PM (#15565091)
This is an extremely biased and misleading take on the situation.

Look at premises passed when the LNP came into power.

https://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco2/documents/nbn-ro...

Total activated in mid 2014, ~250k. That is completely nuts, you make it sound like this was a steady ship the LNP tipped over.

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by boyter on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:46PM (#15565295)
They did have to setup the whole company, negotiate with Telsta, run the backbone's and set everything else up.

They were behind on connections its true, but that was largely due to Telstra having to remediate the ducts filled with asbestos which halted large portions of the rollout. Had they continued I expect that the ramp up would have been similar to New Zealand.

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by zmmmmm on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:49PM (#15565318)
What is biased is citing premises passed at an really phase in a project which deliberately planned to roll out difficult sites first. Of course there were not many premises passed, that is meaningless without context.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by aplummer on Thursday October 26, 2017 @11:15PM (#15565424)
It wasn't though. The rollout follows political seats exactly to the street. In Brisbane this means that it followed the border of marginal ALP seats that cross the river and back again instead of doing adjacent houses.

It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by eggsampler on Thursday October 26, 2017 @11:39PM (#15565541)
The rollout didn't follow political seats. Numbers showed initial rollouts followed 67 labor, 61 coalition, 6 others. Anything more recent than that is really only attributable to the new NBN's MTM direction.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-29/government-announces-n...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by zmmmmm on Friday October 27, 2017 @03:06AM (#15566290)
> It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.

It's a once-in-100 years project to create infrastructure with a lifetime of the same order. It involved replacing nearly 100% of the country's telecommunications infrastructure. 5 years is not particularly long in that context, and trashing it because you can't wait 7 years or even 10 years instead of 5 in exchange for a vastly inferior outcome is just utter stupidity.

So yes, measuring rollout numbers 5 years in is meaningless.

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by aplummer on Friday October 27, 2017 @05:25AM (#15566851)
I disagree that 5 years is a short period of time from 2009 to 2014 in the context of their own estimates saying completion in 2020.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by aplummer on Thursday October 26, 2017 @11:18PM (#15565435)
I don't even vote LNP, but you have to wonder about the efficiency of a rollout where you get faster internet driving an hour out of Melbourne than Fitzroy or a lot of the CBD. For a project originally estimated at 4.7 then 15 then 42 billion, dense paying customers early should probably have been prioritised.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by chowell on Friday October 27, 2017 @12:28AM (#15565713)
If your concern is just with government expenditures, sure, but you can also make the argument that prioritising rural areas could give them a head start on the growth of digital services. Taking Australia from being a market where cities have ~okay~ internet and rural areas have poor internet to one where at first everyone has okay to great connectivity and later everyone has great connectivity has its merits.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by zmmmmm on Friday October 27, 2017 @02:50AM (#15566248)
> where you get faster internet driving an hour out of Melbourne than Fitzroy or a lot of the CBD

Melbourne already had awesome internet, the need was much less there. You can disagree with the decision to rollout to internet-disadvantaged areas if you want, but don't pretend that the conscious decision to do so was bad management when it was actually an attempt at equity (ie: addressing the most needy customers first).

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by qzervaas on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:21PM (#15565162)
It was an unsteady ship that could be righted with some well-known and publicised fixes. Instead they filled it with more water and blamed everybody but themselves.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by neotek on Friday October 27, 2017 @07:36AM (#15567413)
What an incredibly disingenuous use of those figures.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by flukus on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:39PM (#15565261)
Don't forget the National Party who were instrumental in kowtowing to the liberals to build what they originally coined as "Fraudband". They had a once in a lifetime opportunity to deliver a decent internet service to much of rural Australia and they threw it away because it was a Labor idea.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by Retric on Thursday October 26, 2017 @09:50PM (#15564989)
Wait, if the Conservative party decided to destroy it how is that the fault of the Liberal Party?
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by redcap on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:03PM (#15565064)
The Liberal party is the conservative party. No Conservative party in Australia AFAIK.

The Liberal party is broadly social-conservative, pro-business.

The Labor party is broadly speaking socially liberal and pro-labour.

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by cknight on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:12PM (#15565116)
You're on the money, but just a bit out of date. We have a (very) new far-right party called the Australian Conservatives now. The creation of a former Liberal party senator.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by Sag0Sag0 on Thursday October 26, 2017 @11:06PM (#15565376)
Ahh, make australia great again.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by perilunar on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:15PM (#15565129)
> No Conservative party in Australia AFAIK

There's the Family First Party, who merged with Cory Bernardi's Australian Conservatives. There's also the Christian Democratic Party (Fred Nile).

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by rstuart4133 on Sunday October 29, 2017 @07:58PM (#15582277)
> The Liberal party is the conservative party. No Conservative party in Australia AFAIK.

You a little behind the times. That was true many years ago, in the Fraser years. Now it's "The The Liberal party is the conservative party. There is currently no 'John Stuart Mill' liberal party in Australia".

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by NamTaf on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:42PM (#15565273)
Australia has what's referred to as 'big-L' Liberals, who are the conservative side, as opposed to 'small-l' liberals as you'd commonly describe 'liberal politics', i.e. progressive.

Our centre-right party is the Liberal party, our centre-left is called Labor.

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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by ClassyJacket on Thursday October 26, 2017 @09:54PM (#15565011)
Because it's the same party. The Liberal Party is the name of the conservative party.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by vacri on Thursday October 26, 2017 @09:56PM (#15565028)
It's not even a misnomer to our American friends. The Australian main conservative party is more liberal than the American main liberal party.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by masklinn on Friday October 27, 2017 @06:52AM (#15567198)
"Liberals" does not mean "left-leaning" in most of the commonwealth or even the world outside the US, "social-liberal" does but "liberal" on its own is generally center-right and sometimes "conservative-right", the latter being the case for the Liberal Party of Australia (which always existed in opposition to Labour).
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by perilunar on Thursday October 26, 2017 @09:56PM (#15565027)
The Liberal Party of Australia is a conservative party. (The ACCC really should force them to change their name due to false advertising)
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by jimmux on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:25PM (#15565187)
There's an argument to be made that they are socially conservative but economically liberal. That seems to be less true over time, however.
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Re:How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed by vacri on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:22PM (#15565173)
> Some people in metropolitan areas will get connected to the existing coaxial network, which is going to have huge contention problems as it's stretched far beyond what it was ever intended for.

s/some/most/. HFC is the predominant plan for most of the capital cities (I think not... hobart? or was it adelaide?).

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