[LINK] NBN just OPEL rebirthed (was Re: Ubuntu)

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

> Marty writes,
> 
> > The current government ditched OPEL in favour of their NBN plan, but
> > will we see plans reshaped so that it starts to look like OPEL mkII?

Hmm .. would 72% of under-serviced areas be acceptable? I don't think so.

Country folk, from farmers to miners, etc, earn Australia a lot of money.
And niche-market/spot-market-via-the-net farmers could earn Au lots more.

Not to mention all the kids who have little to do at night besides maybe
write the next killer-app. Some of the students I see, when drafted into
helping out as an emergency teacher, are SMART. Very tech savvy! Appears
to me Australia would be much poorer if we ignored such talent, net-wise.

Minchin would bring back OPEL
Suzanne Tindal, ZDNet.com.au
9th March 2009 11:36 AM

If the Coalition were back in power today it would bring back the $950 
million rural broadband network plans which Communications Minister 
Stephen Conroy cancelled, Shadow Minister Nick Minchin said in a video 
interview with ZDNet.com.au last week.

"That's a very hypothetical question," Minchin said, when asked what he 
would do if he was given the power now. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has not 
yet announced the timing of the next Federal election, at which point in 
time anything could have happened, such as an agreement being reached 
with a builder for the government's $4.7 National Broadband Network, 
which would change the situation.

Yet when pressed about what he thought would happen if the Coalition were 
to take power today, Minchin said that he would ignore the work which had 
up until this point been carried out on the National Broadband Network 
and instead focus on an OPEL-like network with about the same level of 
funding.

The rural contract awarded to OPEL, a consortium of Optus and Elders' 
telco arm, has since closed.

"If it was today — given that this process has been so bad, I think we 
would still want to do what we wanted to do in government," he said. 

"I think we should put in place the essence of the OPEL contract. You 
might have to re-tender it now."

Minchin's rival Communications Minister Stephen Conroy ditched the OPEL 
contract in April last year, leaving Optus and Elders, who had won the 
contract together, out in the cold. 

Conroy's reasons for cancelling the contract was the claim that the 
network would only cover 72 per cent of "identified under-served 
premises" and failed to meet the terms of the contract.

If the deal had gone ahead, some of the network would likely have been 
operational this year. Whether the builders would have kept to the 
original timetable in reality will never be known, but Minchin considered 
it an infinitely better option than the wait that rural Australians now 
expected for faster broadband.

Public money should go to under-served areas, not to areas where the 
market should be able to deliver those services, Minchin said, which was 
why a plan targeting rural areas was ideal.

In addition to OPEL, Minchin believed regulation needed to go under the 
microscope while incentives were put in place so that industry would 
build out fast broadband to the rest of Australia. "I don't believe that 
it does require $4.7 billion of government money to do that," he said.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Minchin-would-bring-back-
OPEL/0,130061791,339295337,00.htm

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Cheers,
Stephen