If we must spend $43 billion on a National Broadband Network, shouldn’t the regional centres be getting priority over well-serviced areas?
March 1st, 2013 at 02:15pm
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
Entry Filed under: General News,IT News,Samuel's Editorials
2 Comments
1. frank83 | March 4th, 2013 at 4:29 pm
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.
If it wasn’t for the NBN regional Australia would have broadband by now? Big call Sam. Could you point to any evidence that a big private company (and they would have to be big) was even considering a roll-out of fibre to regional Australia prior to the NBN?
Or was it simply empty rhetoric from a right-wing stooge?
2. Samuel | March 4th, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Did you watch the report? The complaint was that with the NBN as far off as it is, the locals don’t even have ADSL2, and there are no plans to put ADSL2 in the area because the NBN is coming.
The agreement between Telstra and NBN Co. doesn’t help things (and I hold Telstra at fault for that), but the bigger problem is that nobody wants to put in ADSL2 infrastructure or other high-speed infrastructure in to these places because the NBN is coming and the cost outweighs the benefits to service providers given the limited life their ADSL etc infrastructure would be given.
My point was not that fibre would go everywhere (although I would also argue that the NBN rollout is so slow that their fibre network will be largely outdated by the time it’s all in) but that lots if regional places would have ADSL2 or better by now and the back haul infrastructure would be going in with it, if the NBN hadn’t effectively reserved the locations for their own use.
I don’t see fibre to every home and business as reasonable or necessary. Fibre is great for backhaul, but anyone who actually needs the capacity of fibre at their premises should be paying for most of the cost of installing it. Everyone else should be more than happy with the many other technologies which are available now or very close to being available. For example, super-fast wireless is doing great things in the development stage…probably not viable in some of the metro areas, but it would be great in some of the areas which can’t receive fixed-line services of similar quality, and without the NBN, the private sector would be building it because their is a buck to be made.