Gidday David
Although i hate the current government, at least they are spending SOME money on improving infrastructure. Most notably is the NBN, one of the most important government projects of the last few decades.
Wired Internet is a joke. I have ADSL2+, but it does absolutely NOTHING for my
upload speeds whatsoever.
What most businesses need is reasonable
upload speeds (say, 5Mbps), coupled with reasonable download speeds (e.g. 5Mbps ... ). IME, only Microsoft and AVG can achieve download speeds over about 1MBps. I am sure there are other sites that can achieve these speeds, but they are few and far between. 1MBps is ADSL1 speed ... Most sites are between 56 KBps and around 256 KBps IME.
From what I can gather, the NBN will deliver about the speeds I have now, at approximately double the price.
All the rhetoric currently being spruiked by our current "government" and other "experts" does not change the fact one iota that we already have among the best Internet services in the world. Don't rely on the UN 1995 study (as the "government" keeps doing ... ); check out the c.2005 study.
And, just BTW, Keating's "Information Super-highway" has supposedly already delivered what the NBN is promising to do, at vast expense, sometime in the indefinite future ...
I also have no problem with fibre to the node, as the fibre joins can be pre-manufactured as precisely as they need to be in order to work properly. It is fibre to the premises that promises to be a technical nightmare. There is absolutely nothing wrong with co-ax, specially over short distances. It is as fast (fast enough ... ) as fibre - approx. 100,000 m/s vs 297,000 kms/s, but FAR more importantly has approximately identical bandwidth to optical fibre.
Co-ax is cheap and easy to join. Fibre is difficult and expensive to join.
Some other wonderful examples of alarmist waste of money schemes include:
WA built an entire urban railway system including a ticketing system for just under a billion dollars. So far, the Victorian Myki ticketing system has "only" cost $1.5 billion dollars; that's 1,500 piles of one million dollars each. It was a wonderful, unnecessary Labor "government" "initiative" - there was absolutely nothing wrong with the previous ticketing system ... Only to be vastly out-done by their "almost fast train system" at about the same price; and massively out-done by their wonderful desalination plant at some $28 Bn over the next 30 years. Perth may be in dire straits as regards a guaranteed water supply, but Melbourne is not, and never has been. Even at the height of the drought, our reservoirs were still about 30% full ...
I also mention that Perth could run a pipeline from Lake Argyle (downhill all the way ... ) for less than the capital and running costs of your de-sal plant ... I have done the costings.
Brisbane is also building a de-sal plant based on the incorrect and unfounded alarmist predictions of Tim Flannery and some few others. The facts speak for themselves as regards the need for that plant as well.
Decent roads and proper rail freight and passenger services are both far more important than these pie-in-the-sky schemes; as are education, health, disabled and aged services, and help for our Aboriginal Australian brothers and sisters in improving their lot in life.
Less BS and more proper, practical help is what is needed.
If we cannot adequately educate our young; or care for our indigent, aged and infirm; or lift the education, health and economic prospects for our fellow Australians who need it; then all the waffling, rhetoric and BS from "governments" is not worth the paper it is not written on, IMNSHO.
And yeah, I agree with Rally -(?)- when he said "who would engage in a $50Bn project without ANY cost/benefit analysis being done?"
Actually: "
Only an idiot would spend $50 billion without doing a cost benefit analysis, but such is life. And our federal government"
Or any sort of costings, for that matter ...
