Fwd: Re: [LINK] The PLAN, and broadband speeds?

[David Lochrin]

[My original response only went to Karl (my mistake) so I'm forwarding his to Link.]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: [LINK] The PLAN, and broadband speeds?
Date: Wednesday 20 June 2007 15:51
From: Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au>
To: dlochrin at d2.net.au

On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 15:27 +1000, David Lochrin wrote:
>    There's a whole herd of elephants in the room, in fact.  But doing
> anything on this scale requires serious money and some guarantees that
> the resulting infrastructure will be actually used.  We certainly need
> "vision" on a very wide scope, but not arm-waving.

Indeed no. Vision should not be a lie.

>    Let's say the proposal is to replace all existing copper subscriber
> connections with fibre of some sort.

Good Lord, why? Copper can carry really good bandwidth - ADSL2+ and so on. Replacing fibre can happen as the infrastructure is replaced in the normal coarse of events.

> ugly issues of access-control, copyright, monoply content provision,
> compensation, and so on.

I'm sorry, but I think you've missed the point about "vision". It means defining where we want to be and why; it involves seeing the forest, not the trees. The problems you mention are trivial (yes, I mean that just so: trivial), it is just that self-interested players have made them loom large in our minds.

Access control? Make it so that you use it or lose it. Then who cares who uses it?

Copyright: The Internet poses no new issues, we've just been bamboozled into selling ourselves for a mess of pottage by American commercial interests.

Monopoly content provision? Monopolies need lock in. Kick out the supporting strut of monopoly network ownership, and monopoly content provision collapses. Given ten or twenty years it must needs collapse of its own weight anyway.

Compensation? Make it fair and pay it. Whatever it is. It will still be cheaper that NOT doing it.

>    Our national propensity to avoid difficult issues is costing us big
> money.

It is costing us a great deal more than money. Like the dismantling of the rail system, the handing over of greenfields to shortsighted and rapacious developers, the privatisation of crucial common resources like power and a whole raft of other twentieth-century idiocies, it is costing us our future.

Regards, K.

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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)

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