ACCC to NBN Co: 'get cracking' The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has threatened to step in with price regulation if it thinks that NBN Co, the company building the country's National Broadband Network, is moving too slowly. The regulator told the NBN parliamentary committee that NBN Co has not yet lodged its "Special Access …
Get a move on. My ADSL2 line is flaky as hell, the telco that owns the infrastructure has no interest in fixing it. My area is in rollout stage 2, due to start in October 2011 according to the plan released last week, but as far as I'm aware they haven't even selected a contractor yet in this state.
<quote>Unless and until the SAU is accepted, NBN Co is facing major commercial risk. </quote>
Um, no. NBN Co does not face *any* commercial risk. They are a government backed monopoly. They may face some political risk, but all this posturing on prices is just for show. It's not as if we have any real* choice to take our business elsewhere.
* Technically I guess we could all emmigrate.
The NBN is nothing but a gigantic fraud designed to allow commercial content providers to deliver media content over a Government provided network ( I'm looking at you Rupert Murdoch & Foxtel ).
I spent several years commercially researching fibre systems for new developments and new apartment buildings in Australia. The basic facts are that they have no ROI that can produce a break-even in investement in under 25 years.
That's why no commercial operator has been in the least bit interested.
When a stupid Government steps in and provides the infrastructure (and believe me it's a massive infrastructure, equivalent to at least $4K per premise, perhaps a lot more) The only people who get benefit are the high volume content providers, and the only people who pay are the taxpayers.
The fake arguments put up about telemedicine etc are a total distraction. Any telemedicine needed can be done at local or regional access points. The rest is just so much hokum.
I have only just attended a meeting organised by the department of Prime Minister and Cabinet where the main thrust of the discussion was security requirements for businesses in the NBN era. The theory was the NBN would simply make attacks ever so much faster. Wow!
Business doesn't need the new massive bandwidth as they already have a comercially viable fibre network. Nor do the majority of consumers. The economic modelling is done by non-industry economists who have no clue of the commercial models and lump in the 'benefits' of all the 'new jobs' created to push the fibre out.
Throw in the public safety issue where ordinary phones cease to be reliable and simply shut down in power failures you have a repeat of the ill-though-out schemes such as the home insulation project that sounded good but in fact rorted money and killed quite a few.
None of this would have been an issue if our very own thatcherite John Howard hadn't privatised Telstra. If Telstra was still government-owned, the NBN would already have been fully rolled out by now by adding to the pre-existing Telstra infrastructure. Cost? About 3bn, nowhere near what we'll have to pay for the all-new NBN. Selling Telstra not looking like such a profitable idea now, is it?
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