“Whats wrong with the NBN” by the Australian ABC's Four Corners investigative program was falsely presented as NZ v AU rivalry and political incompetence in tonight's program and was incompetently watered down and poorly reported.
What was totally missed was the lost opportunity for Australian businesses to become more competitive and develop new internet-based industries by being denied even basic internet speeds even to this day, some 4 years on.
Even once connected to the NBN, max 100 mb connections are inadequate to host your own server or offer internet support services such as backup and disaster recovery. Gigabit connections are only available by renting space from a “data-centre” usually located in a foreign country such as New Zealand or Singapore …. or at a prime CBD location for 4 times the cost.
Not once was the flawed politically expediant rollout of residentail customers before business customers mentioned and only once was the pivitol Telstra relationship hinted at.
Did you know for instance that NBN equipment resides in telephone exchange buildings still owned and operated by Telstra and rented to NBN Co.
Successive Labour and Liberal governments have failed to spur Australian economic cyber growth by denying Australian business access to NBN internet and this leaving them with no other alternative than to purchase fibre services from Telco heavyweights Telstra and Vocus at rates 500% more expensive than can be purchased through NBN co.
Even in late 2017, Perth CBD and inner city business districts of West Perth and Subiaco are still awaiting the NBN rollout, 4 years after it was rolled out to rural Tasmania where there was no demand.
Although 4 corners interviewed some business customers in Australia, they were all living and operating at suburban addresses amongst residential customers. Not one business person operating out of a genuine business premises was interviewed.
We believe this was a deliberate and negotiated settlement between Telstra and NBN Co to allow Telstra and its rivals to milk Australian businesses for as long as possible by delaying NBN rollout to business areas and then finally deploying the slowest possible FTTN solution once available thus driving businesses to takeup fibre connections outside of NBN offerings such as 100/100 connections with Telstra and Vocus.
The logical NBN rollout solution would have been to tackle the highest population areas first such as each state capital CBD and business districts with FTTB (Fibre to the basement) and FTTP (Fibre to the premise) by offering gigabit connections followed by the industrial areas before attempting residential deployments.
Prioritising Residential NBN deployment has been a political deployment numbers game to justify each governments existence and has merely fuelled the rise in data consumption with the uptake of Netflix (A US company) and Stan but has provided no benefit to Australian Businesses or the Australian economy other than the major telcos and data center operators. Netflix success has been at the expense of other internet users in terms of data hogging.
Once again, both major political parties have shown their support for multi-national telcos and the big end of town (political party donaters) over the SMB community who incidentally combined are the largest employers in Australia and given the toughest and most expensive deck of cars.
Shame – Austraia – Shame.
:jk:
4 comments to “Whats Wrong with the NBN? – the 4 corners report for one?”
Adelaide Dupont - October 24, 2017
Thank you for pulling out the problems with the FOUR CORNERS documentary on the National Broadband Network.
I thought a good sysadmin / sysengineer would do this well.
Now I understand why the Internet is often so slow when it comes to distances.
I imagine you deal with this a lot in Western Australia.
Martin Barr-David - October 27, 2017
What about all those people being conned out of a connection or those dodgy connections by subcontractors?
Martin Barr-David - October 27, 2017
FTTN is a scam. People should have optic fibre to their door. Liberal/National Party are con artists.
Martin Barr-David - October 27, 2017
FTTN or FTTC means if there’s a blackout in your area you lose phone & Internet connection. You can blame Newscorp & Coalition for this fuck up.