[LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[Frank O'Connor]

Well for mine:

1. Peter Martin’s columns have read like Malcolm Turnbull cheerleader hype for some time now. As one of the Age’s Commentariat he has been pretty much way to the right of public sentiment for some time, has a really poor record of accuracy and predictive validity (look at the last election as an example of martin and the Age being as divorced from political reality as News Ltd) and often ventured into areas in which all he does is showcase his spectacular ignorance of anything remotely technical.

2. The Age has, of its own admission, shifted to the right … which is why Martin has survived the various Fairfax Nights of the Long Knives over the last few years.

3. Martin, Kenny and others are amongst the many reasons I resiled from my Age subscription about 18 months back. To date, I have not regretted doing so. ‘Become more like News Ltd’ is probably a self defeating business (and survival) strategy … but that’s the way they elected to go. I’m guessing subscriptions continue to fall away.

On the article:

1. Anecdotally, my brother (in Brunswick) got an FTTP connection, and I got a HFC MTM-NBN connection. He gets EXACTLY the bandwidth he contracted for, day-in-day-out, no matter what time of day, no matter what the current demand. At bets, I got about 45% of what I originally contracted for, and dependent on local demand, at worst I get less than 10% of same. So, just from personal experience … everything Martin says in that article is incorrect and full of ‘alternative truths.

2. I have no idea who Martin’s cited expert is (and was surprised he didn’t quote Henry Ergas), but others like Paul Budde and serious networking technicians have panned the MTM-NBN mercilessly.

3. Blaming Labor for the shortcomings of the MTM NBN is a leap way too far. Their idea of the NBN wasn’t perfect, but the government’s changes (which resulted in a network capable of 10% of the performance, at better than 100% of the price, with operational overheads that will only increase this cost … and with a cost to upgrade/update even before it is finished that will probably exceed the current build cost) pretty much resulted in a White Elephant that should never have been built.

4. Finally, if technology really is 'neutral’, why didn’t they build a network based on carrier pigeons, or drumbeats, or the Horns that bought down Jericho. Bottom line: Improvements in technology happen, and it makes sense - from efficiency, effectiveness, performance, economics and other considerations -  to adopt those improvements rather than the old technology when building major infrastructure projects for the FUTURE.

Fibre to the Premises was the right choice. Fibre could have handled Australia’s communications needs for the next 50 years. We could have done it once, and done it right.

As it is … all the MTM infrastructure will have to be trashed ‘real soon now', and a full fibre network installed … at a costs that will rival, but probably double, the compromised network we installed in the first place. 

We have been put 20-25 years behind the rest of the world by political ideologues and technophobe economists without vision, and of the course the cheerleading Commentariat of Martin and others, with God knows what flow on effects (or lack thereof) on our economy as little numbers like IOT, AI, remote service provision and a host of other leading edge technologies reach the mainstream in the rest of the world.

Peter Martin may feel comfortable with a government having condemned its population to becoming a technological backwater, a nation of consumers of other nations’ content, but a lot of us are a tad concerned.

Not too worry though … Martin will come across these concerns when the shit has hit the fan and be a reactionary condemnatory commentator further blaming others for the technological troglodytes of the LNP … because of his dedication to ‘alternative facts’.

Just my 2 cents worth …
---
> On 10 Aug 2017, at 2:28 pm, Roger Clarke <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:
> 
>> On 10/08/17 09:10, Jan Whitaker wrote:
>>>> I'm in a twitter argument with him. He doesn't understand technology. Please come and help out, set him straight.   @1petermartin
> 
> At 2:06 PM +1000 10/8/17, Kim Holburn wrote:
>> How many years now have the Libs been managing the NBN?  If the Labor plan was so bad that it couldn't be fixed the government could have canned the whole thing.  Surely the great economic managers could have fixed what was wrong in the last x years that they have had *complete* responsibility for it, but no, it's Labor's fault?  Peter Martin has gone full stupid on this.
> 
> Over the last year, I've felt Martin's material to be a mixed bag.  
> 
> He wrote a couple of things early on in the debate on the Census debacle that had me scratching my head a bit.  And later he wrote a couple of things that were very clear explanations of important arguments (which happened to align with my analysis, so I was of course inclined to applaud).
> 
> So it may be that he trips gaily into areas that are (for him) new ones, takes a little while to assimilate the potentially large large volume of potentially very confusing material that's gone before (including, in many cases, active disinformation), and meanwhile keeps churning out the wordage that his position and editor demand.
> 
> If he's still got his sense of humour and antennae intact after the current fracas, he may write some much better things over the coming months.
> 
> 
> Meanwhile, another one of those memes has re-emerged in the Cloud Cuckoo Land that is contemporary US politics:
> 
> Maybe Americans don't need fast home Internet service, FCC suggests
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/maybe-americans-dont-need-fast-home-internet-service-fcc-suggests/
>> Americans might not need a fast home Internet connection, the Federal Communications Commission suggests in a new document. Instead, mobile Internet via a smartphone might be all people need.
> 
> -- 
> Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
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> 
> Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
> Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University
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