How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

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...

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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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