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thought that the program missed an important point - why was the NBN put forward in the first place?
looking back through the history, it seems to have been born in absolute frustration with Telstra, who were sitting on a nice little monopoly earner - almost every ADSL user had to give them $30pm for access to the old network - and they didn't want anything at all done to upset that applecart. At one stage they even had a couple of High Court cases running against the Howard government to try to force their own agenda (which included locking all competitors out of access to the copper network). It looked to me like both LNP and ALP eventually got to the point of realising that Telstra was not going to do the nation building thing and that something had to be done to bypass them and drag us out of the IT stone age.
So NBN was born - not the best way to decide to do something, but it looked like there was no alternative. Then in typical ALP fashion, the plan was not really thought through before implementation began and in typical LNP fashion, it was neutered on the basis that anything with ALP written on it had to be demolished, regardless of it's worth.
And even after all that, what has survived it is better than nothing - for one thing it is much cheaper than ADSL used to be and it works OK for many. Apart from some unscrupulous retailers who cut corners on backhaul, the main problem seems to be that some customers get the ALP version while others get the LNP version (or none at all) depending purely on the whim of the gods - and no-one can explain how decisions are made on who gets the good version and who gets something else.
Let's just hope that, when it is sold at some future date, it is not given entirely to Telstra as another monoploly. Maybe the Future Fund could buy the whole thing and lease it out to interested Telcos in sections, on a competitive basis. Or maybe it could just be put on the Government books as a critical piece of national infrastructure (like roads for example) and run for the benefit of the nation.
Last edited by Shiraz; 24-10-2017 at 10:48 PM.
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