[LINK] Consumers were forced into Wireless - Was - A national broadband network?

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Paul Brooks
> Sent: Monday, 21 November 2011 11:35 AM
> To: link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] A national broadband network?
> 
> 
> On 21/11/2011 9:43 AM, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> > More depressing, Nick, The Oz knows damn well that sign-on 
> numbers of 
> > a
> > trial network do not make a story.
> >
> > RC
> 
> Indeed. The subset of users that are being charged for their 
> service, and might on that basis be justified in feeling 
> their service is now "in production" and no longer trial 
> (even though they really are still trial), may have been 
> charged commercially for no longer than 6 weeks. What was the 
> take-up of ADSL or mobile services 6 weeks after the 
> respective networks went commercial, and the performance 
> still somewhat uncertain? Not 11% I'll wager.
> 
> It also disingenuously implies that 100% of those for which 
> the NBN is "available" are valid members of the pool, 
> ignoring the proportion within the footprint that don't have 
> any need for any broadband connection.
> 
> Its another beat-up.
> 
> The reality is that the ISPs have not been trying to sign up 
> lots and lots of customers while they are still working out 
> their very manual provisioning processes, building the IT 
> systems to automate it, designing the pricing model, and 
> integrating the NBN equipment into their OSS and BSS. A few 
> thousand customers is more than enough to inconvenience while 
> the wrinkles are ironed out of the end-to-end systems and processes.

And of course, the shortage of capacity at 99% of Australia's exchanges
that is now being alleviated with Telstra's Top-Hat initiative might
have something to do with the take-up failure numbers.

Now we will see the late adopters who previously had no option but to go
wireless jump onto the ADSL2 bandwagon.

I can't help (somewhat slightly cynically) but wonder why Telstra took
until now (post ACMA DLL pricing decision) to roll-out Tophat.

Although with the POI's it is basically another lay down misere, here
ISP's, nice ADSL2+ to resell to your clients and some nice POI
backhaul's... Come and get it so we can bankrupt the ones we missed in
1990's.

TomK