[LINK] NBN white-elephant-to-be: better spend the $$$ on other things

[David Goldstein]

It's not couch potatoes who want high-speed broadband. The OECD has published 
several reports over the years on the need for countries to invest in high-speed 
internet, most of them probably published when the Tories were in power, that 
gave examples of why countries need to invest in high-speed broadband giving 
examples of how it will be used. And how countries who don't will fall behind 
economically.

Of course, those who think the speeds we have now are fine and we don't need to 
invest also probably thought dial-up was more than adequate 15 years ago!

We wouldn't have, whether you like them or not, torrent sharing, YouTube and a 
myriad of other developments if we stuck with broadband. How the internet will 
be used in 15 years with even higher speed internet access can only partly be 
predicted.

To say we shouldn't have broadband investment due to other priorities is silly. 
There are many areas governments spend money, and people too, that you can't 
justify on many grounds. You could argue that our health care paying thousands 
of dollars for operations to save one life is unjustifiable when the same amount 
of money would save hundreds or thousands of lives in a developing country. How 
many lives could you save in a developing country with mosquito nets for the 
same cost of say, a hip operation? Or how many thousands of lives could be saved 
in developing countries for all the dollars donated to cancer research?

David



----- Original Message ----
> From: Ned Lukies <ned at madforit.com.au>
> To: link at anu.edu.au
> Sent: Thu, 19 August, 2010 12:07:40 PM
> Subject: Re: [LINK] NBN white-elephant-to-be: better spend the $$$ on other 
>things
> 
> 
> On 17/08/2010, at 11:43 PM, Robin Whittle wrote:
> 
> > Its a mistake to think all this could be done for $43B.  This sort of
> > massive expenditure would have to be at the expense of other vital
> > priorities such as health, welfare, education, renewable energy
> > research etc.  Most people having fibre is a luxury we can't afford.
> > DSL is fine for most purposes.  The only thing fibre does better is
> > support high quality video streaming.  Why spend tens of billions of
> > dollars for the benefit of couch potatoes?
> 
> I would be happy with DSL, even happier with ADSL2. My ADSL2+ connection 
>currently syncs at about 1900kbs, and drops out about 8 times a day (more when 
>it is raining, where it can become unusable). Telstra have looked at the line 
>many a time, nothing can really be done about it. No, I don't live in the middle 
>of nowhere, I am less than 2km from the Brisbane CBD. 
>
> 
> DSL is great when it works, but there are a large number of places and 
>situations where it doesn't and from my understanding, the problem is only going 
>to get worse as more and more people use it. The situation at my work is even 
>worse, the lack of DSL ports has lead us to purchase a 4mb symmetrical fibre 
>connection with 60gb of data per month. All for the measly price of $140 per 
>day, yes per day. At that rate, ~$2000 to install fibre to the house doesn't 
>sound like a lot. 
>
> 
> Some of us need a reliable Internet connection to work. I am sick of people 
>assuming that just because I think fibre is the way to go I must sit around 
>downloading pr0n and warez all day. 
>
> 
> Ned
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