[LINK] Planned nbn outage comms

[David]

On Monday, 29 September 2025 08:56:58 AEST Sylvano wrote:
> Is this the retailer being slack, a lack of data driven comms flow between wholesaler and retailer, a generous use of the term ‘planned’ by the wholesaler, or … ?

...or is it the result of privatising an essential social service which is a natural government-run monopoly?

Australia has placed the design & implementation of our national communications infrastructure largely in the hands of for-profit, privately owned companies which are at least partially overseas controlled.  I understand Optus is owned by Singapore interests.  So quite apart from the issue of architectural integration, what else would we expect?

News reports this morning indicate the Taliban may have succeeded in completely cutting Internet access from Afghanistan.  It occurred to me recently to wonder what might happen if, for all practical purposes, the Internet in Australia completely failed.  Just think about it...  the old manual processes & customs have been long forgotten, supply chains and ordinary daily commerce is frozen.  I wonder if we have a national fallback plan?  Probably not, where's the profit?

The ABC Book Show has just reviewed an interesting novel "What We Can Know" by Ian McEwan - see  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-27/best-books-september-ian-mcewan-patrick-ryan-lee-lai/105805520#whatcanweknow  As he says, the best way of writing about where we're headed is to _not_ write about it, but his description of England in an exhausted, post-industrial world should be well worth reading.

> What will people make of us, 100 years into the future?
> 
> In Ian McEwan's new eco-novel, the British author (Atonement, Amsterdam) finds a clever way to get us thinking about our place in history.  His narrator, Thomas, is an academic living in the 2120s, whose area of obsession is our era, right now — the beginning of what he and his  colleagues know as the 'Derangement'.

Cheers!!
_David L_