Samuel's Blog

Some good news for a Friday evening

It is always nice to be able to end a Friday with some good news, and as I received two bits of good news today, I thought I’d share them and an extra bit of good news, just for good measure.

Firstly, I received confirmation today that some things I ordered some weeks ago have just been shipped from the US. As anyone who knows me well would know, I have a bit of a collection of NYPD merchandise. To complete (well, mostly, I’m sure I could buy more stuff if I wanted to) this collection, I placed a sizeable order a few weeks back. I was excited when payment was taken a couple weeks later as this confirmed that the items were all available, and today I received an email confirming that the order has shipped. Even more excitingly, the order has been shipped through a faster service than I expected, and is expected to arrive early next week.

The second bit of good news is that when I checked my post office box today, there was a very flattering and interesting invitation to an event in Melbourne. Alas I don’t think I’ll be able to go, and I’m not sure if the event’s details are public yet so I won’t divulge them, but it was exciting anyway and I will keep the invitation regardless of whether I choose to go or not.

Finally, some good news for all and sundry. The Bolt Report returns to Channel Ten this weekend on Sunday at 10am. For those of us in regional areas, some even better news in that Southern Cross Ten will be taking the show live. No more waiting tensely all day for the 4:30pm replay. Alas, the afternoon replay has been dumped in favour of a condensed replay of the revamped Meet The Press, but that’s understandable seeing as Ten and News Limited have put quite some effort in to making Meet The Press a more interesting and useful program than it was in recent years.

I wish you a good weekend, and hope you will join me in enjoying seeing Andrew Bolt’s insightful program on Sunday morning.

I suppose I might have to share some photos of some of the NYPD stuff when it arrives too…now that’s something to look forward to!

Samuel

March 1st, 2013 at 07:45pm

If we must spend $43 billion on a National Broadband Network, shouldn’t the regional centres be getting priority over well-serviced areas?

It seems that in areas of Central West NSW where 3G (not 4G) and ADSL1 (not ADSL2 or ADSL2+) services are all that is currently on offer, the National Broadband Network rollout will not occur until 2016.

(h/t Daniel Gibson and Alex Bernhardt, Prime7 News, Central West NSW, 28 February 2013)

Wasn’t the whole premise of the NBN that it would ensure that people in regional areas were to receive internet services which would be on-par with their counterparts in metropolitan areas? Wasn’t that the main reason behind the idea of spending $43 billion dollars? NBN Co’s Statement of Intent, which was tabled in Parliament on the 9th of October last year (more than three years after the project was started…one does have to wonder what took so long) certainly seems to think so:

Introduction
In the Statement of Expectations released on 20 December 2010 the Government expressed three central objectives for the National Broadband Network (NBN):
– To deliver significant improvement in broadband service quality to all Australians;
– To address the lack of high-speed broadband in Australia, particularly outside of metropolitan areas; and
– To reshape the telecommunications sector.
The NBN will enable high-speed broadband to be delivered to all Australian households, businesses and enterprises, through a combination of Fibre-To-The-Premise (FTTP), Fixed Wireless and Satellite technologies

(start of page 4, NBN Co. Statement of Corporate Intent 2012-2015).

$43 billion dollars with a primary goal of getting regional areas up to scratch, and it’s going to take until after the “Statement of Corporate Intent” expires to get Central West NSW completed, and that’s if it doesn’t get delayed even further!

The demand is there. If the NBN wasn’t preventing the private sector from building private infrastructure, this would be done by now, or at least be almost completed. This whole government-run scheme is an expensive shambles.

Samuel

2 comments March 1st, 2013 at 02:15pm