Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 188 posts

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#71

Post by boyter »

i336_ wrote: post #3

For people actually sad about the NBN: this mentions that people who want 1Gbps "will have an upgrade option" (I think they said it something like that). This was from Feb 12 this year. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/downloadthissho...

Unless you are on FTTN which will comprise more than 60% of the network and are only guaranteed up-to 12 mbit for the coexistence period and 25 mbit after. Unless you happen to be connected to a node less than 50m away (most will be over 400m) there is no chance your connection will support that option.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#72

Post by daemin »

marak830 wrote: post #8

I was born and raised in Australia, I left for Japan just as the NBN was beginning to roll out. It's an absolute disgrace how much it has been butchered. I have thoughts about returning occasionally, but going from 2 GB/s unlimited for Aus$ 40 ish a month, back to those speeds and prices is a major factor for me staying here. It is a massive quality of life difference to have amazing internet.

I used to have decent ADSL2+ while living in Inner Suburb Sydney, I got close to 20mbit/s. Now I am living in Poland and have 250/20 unlimited for less than a third of the price.

The whole NBN project just irritates me at how it has been mis-managed, by both of the political parties.

Yes, Labor included since they could have sped things up by having Fibre to the basement for most apartment buildings in the cities, and then upgraded those lines once the other build out had been completed. Also for having the rollout happen along political lines (as has been alleged).

Still most of the blame I assign to the Liberals, since it seems they want to make a shambles out of this for political reasons, and also so they can sell it to some other company in the near future.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#73

Post by fit2rule »

andrewstuart wrote: post #47

If you posed the question "Who in the world would be the worst possible person to decide on how to construct a nationwide high speed computer network?", the you might come up with a list that included Tony Abbott. I genuinely believe that Tony Abbott really didn't even understand what purpose the Internet serves, apart from email and playing games - he saw it as some sort of frivolous discretionary spend - definitely…

>Seriously it is time for a citizens revolution. We need to take the country back from these idiots.

Nothing can be done until Australians demand Constitution reform. This is the crux of the problems with Australian politics - its Constitution is absolutely atrocious.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#75

Post by strken »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #62
flukus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cartoon wasn't racist, it's your own bias that makes you think it is.

I'm not Australian, but I went back and looked at it again and I can't see any possible way to interpret it that isn't racist. Perhaps you could fill me in?

I read it as a statement that the problems faced by remote aboriginal communities are structural and obey institutional inertia; that they are hard problems.

We have a history of well-intentioned reformers coming in and making everything much worse: the stolen generation, the NTER, laws against alcohol consumption that cause even more destructive patterns of behaviour, etc. I've known men and women who trained as police, and went off to the NT rosy-cheeked idealists. All came back either depressed or outright racist. It's a hard problem.

Abusive parents create abused children, who grow up to be abusive parents themselves; the same is true of poverty. Abuse and poverty are grinding cycles that are very hard to disrupt. How do you teach a boy who's never met his father about the importance of being there for his own sons and daughters? How do you talk about the cycle without blaming or objectivising the human beings trapped within?

But then, maybe Bill Leak was just plain old racist, and I read a pattern in the noise.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#76

Post by d_t_w »

ars wrote: post #68
d_t_w wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, do you think the extra context ameliorates the Prime Minister's proud defence of base racism?

As an outsider, sounds like he defended free speech, not racism. So yes, the extra content makes a huge difference.

Thanks. Personally I'm comfortable that both the location and further context are extraneous.

His assertion that it united the nation is misguided enough (and clearly factually incorrect, though as an outsider you may not be aware of that).

That the PM chose that particular cartoon to exalt speaks volumes.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#77

Post by thanksgiving »

imron wrote: post #46
shard972 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say they changed it for no reason is omitting the state of the roll out at that time. The budget was already blowing out beyond 2x the cost, they were behind on their revised down goals, they missed wireless numbers by 90%. The only positive thing they could tout at the time was pass by numbers which ignores the hardest part of the roll out, connecting fiber to each and every house. You can argue that the last mil…

And now the budget is still blowing out, only we have shitty infrastructure that's going to be obsolete almost as soon as it's installed. The Liberals messed this one up (note to Americans, in Australia the 'Liberals' are the conservatives).

The liberals might have got the final nail in the coffin but nbn fate was sealed the moment they decided Telstra should have anything to do with the project at all.

Edit fate not gate

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#78

Post by Danihan »

dang wrote: post #44
d_t_w wrote: post #26

Country is a basket case politically, lowest calibre of politician I have ever encountered. A profound paucity of talent across the board and absolutely no end in sight to the endless stupidity. You can think of the shit infrastructure, crap attitude in general, and intellectually bankrupt waste that make up the political class as the many layers of tax on any high cognitive business in Australia. Coal is the future…

Please don't post nationalistic rants here. I get that this one is probably the clean-up-our-own-house kind, but that subtlety doesn't work on the internet.

Do you know what nationalism is? Because this doesn't seem to be it by any standard definition..

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#79

Post by grizzles »

I have a personal perspective on this. Around 2014 or so, I + some of Australia's top physicists designed and quickly prototyped some tech to lower the cost of the NBN rollout bigtime. Our approach revolved around self install fibre + a far greater use of wireless.

I contacted 15+ people in senior leadership at NBNco, all of whom are still on my LinkedIn. No matter how hard I tried, we couldn't get a meeting with NBNco execs to demo our tech.

I took it to the local tech press here to get some positive coverage and they told us repeatedly how "stupid" we were. We wrote comments on the now PM (then Communications Minister)'s blog and chatted to his people. Zero interest. At that point they'd been at it for ~7 years, spent billions and had pretty much nothing to show for it. Nada.

Last year, an academic completely unaffiliated with us testified at a parliamentary committee into why the existing approach has been such a boondoggle. As a remedy, he suggested our exact approach. He also copped it from the tech press.

Here are a couple tweets from that period between me and an online tech pundit. This Renai LeMay fellow runs Australia's most influential tech site, it's very very popular with Australia's politicians:

https://twitter.com/renailemay/status/705523306699423744 https://twitter.com/renailemay/status/705528311330385920

Such is the life of the serial entrepreneur. This is the typical bs that we have to put up with. I folded that company up pretty fast. Idea tested. NEXT.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#80

Post by tray5 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #47

If you posed the question "Who in the world would be the worst possible person to decide on how to construct a nationwide high speed computer network?", the you might come up with a list that included Tony Abbott. I genuinely believe that Tony Abbott really didn't even understand what purpose the Internet serves, apart from email and playing games - he saw it as some sort of frivolous discretionary spend - definitely…

>Seriously it is time for a citizens revolution. We need to take the country back from these idiots.

Couldn't agree more. I've yet to meet a single fellow Aussie that has anything but disdain for politicians from any party. Labor, Liberal, Greens, One Nation doesn't seem to matter, they're all a pack of self serving con artists, and unless the major political parties take a serious look at themselves over the next few years, this is exactly what they're going to be dealing with. Especially as Millennials take their first steps into adulthood in a country that does nothing but tread on them and dismiss them as nothing but avocado loving morons that don't know how to make it in "the real world".

Post reply on HN