[LINK] Four Corners NBN

[Frank O'Connor]

Nice presentation, but seems to me that the 'rift' and conflict is 
ideological and not based on communications/physics facts.

Everybody seems to think that more bandwidth and better network is 
good ... the nay-sayers tried to bring out the wireless turkey again, 
but this was not accepted by the program.

Other (less visionary shall we say) commentators said we should be 
building for now, not 10 years down the track .. and one guy (Malcolm 
Turnbull's ex attack dog now resident in Europe) ... said the 
European experience was that only 17% elected to take it up when 
offered to them. (17% in 18 months - when the European fibre network 
is still only 40% built ... not bad I would have thought.)

Yeah, heaps better to build a hodge-podge of interconnected networks 
using heavily obsolescent technology with the same old peering and 
other inefficiencies as we've had in the past.

Turnbull and others pointed out that private enterprise is always 
better and can do these things more efficiently, and the whole NBN 
thing was a government monopoly secured by legislation that prevented 
the private sector from cherry-picking its way to profit ... whilst 
presumably expecting the government to socialise the loss making 
geographic and social sectors if that cherry picking hadn't been 
prohibited.

Nobody pointed out that past major infrastructure projects ... from 
roads and public transport, to telecommunications (in the days of the 
old PMG), to hospitals and health, and the rest were all built by 
government. Private industry simply got into them around the edges 
after the infrastructure was in place ... because they couldn't 
afford the initial investment, because the rate of return was 
unsatisfactory for attracting shareholders, and they simply didn't 
have the imagination and vision, Business is a day to day, week to 
week, year to year concern ... it's not a place where you expect to 
find the Vision thing. When it could be taken over as an 
up-and-running cash cow however ... well, that was a different 
proposition.

And that's why our communications infrastructure is what it is today 
... basically reliant on infrastructure put into the ground by 
government (under the aegis of the PMG and then Telstra before it was 
privatised), laying all that copper, building all those exchanges, 
laying all that fibre up to 1997 ... everything that's been done 
since has been playing around the edges, maximising use of an 
existing infrastructure. Sure mobiles and wireless are new ... but 
they don't involve a fraction of the setup costs and effort that the 
original (and still the core) infrastructure did. And the cash cow up 
until recently has been fixed line and exchange based comms ...

Private industry simply couldn't or wouldn't do an NBN. Telstra maybe 
could have done it ... but they elected not to do so for more than 20 
years, they elected not to bid for the initial NBN project, and they 
basically sat on their hands and invested in multiple failed overseas 
investments as an alternate investment policy over the years. Telstra 
couldn't afford it today.

So, was Four Corners a wasted opportunity?

No. I liked the explanation of the possibilities of fibre using 
'colours' instead of 'channels' as a geek would have explained it. I 
liked seeing the experience of remote users with high bandwidth 
fibre, of the difficulties faced by that cystic fibrosis lady in 
Bendigo under the current 'high bandwidth' environment, of the bloke 
employing 600-700 people in the bush in a photo-processing company, 
of how ADSL performance falls off rapidly with distance, of the 
realties and limitations of our current communications environment. I 
knew about them before, but I doubt Joe Public did.

It won't stop the hoo-hah, it won't stop the self-interested turf 
protecting local press, it won't stop other self-interested parties 
from trying defend existing turfs, it won't stop the Sydney and 
Melbourne shock jocks, and it won't stop the politics.

But it was a reasonably good relatively unbiased coverage of the issues.

Definitely worth a watch on iView if you missed it.