<with held> wrote:
Subject: More on NBN
G'day ORSM bloke, The following is from an Expat Aussie now living in Asia that worked for OTC. His comments are uncensored and verbatim...

I've been trying to convince people that the NBN is a joke since day 1 - and I'm not particularly aligned to any political party because they're all tarred with the same brush. This "NBN project" was clearly designed as a major vote catcher - and it turns out that it did its job admirably by completely sucking in the "regional" independents to back Labor.

I agree with the sentiments below. Here in Vietnam I'm on a "100Mbps" connection (and that's what it says I've got whenever I check my connection online), but the reality is that my average download speed is normally far less than 100kbps (that's a "k" not an "M"!!!). Why? Because everyone shares the capacity in a network - much like your downstairs shower drying up when someone is showering upstairs. In Vietnam, we have an incredibly rapid take-up of internet use (and hence internet capacity). The telco's simply can't cope with the pace of take-up and are frantically upgrading as we speak from 3G to 4G, which will help for a while - but they've learned from other's mistakes and free wi-fi is everywhere!!!

Why? See following.

The other thing I'd add to the sentiments below is that digital technology has changed everything. In the old analogue days you got what you got, full stop. But digital communication has the capacity to be engineered to a far higher level of sophistication than analogue, hence the rapid strides forward that we've seen in recent years and will continue to see for years to come. And that applies specifically to wireless - which is currently in 'start-up' mode but which has immense scope for advancement and will still be around long after the last shred of fibre is hanging off the gateposts (admittedly, wireless requires many base stations - but we can expect the technological advances will gradually lessen the number of base stations required because the signals will be so much stronger and able to carry so much further...).

And what the f*ck would you or I do with a genuine 100Mbps anyway - start an online movie production company that allows users to download Ben Hur in 0.5 second??? If not, you'd be wasting the vast majority of available capacity...

$43 billion rollout of a network that will never do what it's claimed to do is a joke, but there are so many vested interests behind it that no-one is questioning it (except "luddite" Abbott, who unfortunately destroyed his own techo cred in the lead-up to the election so will never get an audience).

I'm hanging onto my Telstra shares because they're going to be worth a fortune when the government of the day has to beg them to come in and sort this mess out!!!
Cheers
Marty

PS OTC was the Overseas Telecommunications Commission and never a subsidiary of Telecom - we were fierce competitors at all levels and were dragged kicking and screaming into the so-called "merger" (read "takeover") with Telecom to form Telstra!!! The only problem with the razor gang was they never went nearly far enough with Telecom. As Keating proposed at the time, OTC would have made a very credible "Company B" to compete with Telecom - we would have wiped the floor with the corrupt, bloated bastards instead of vanishing under their sheer weight of numbers after the "merger"!!!

("Telstra was originally Telecom and before that it was the PMG which was the Post Master Generals Dept." )

Keep up the good work....

Now we need someone to work on the internet filter.... remove it, that is...