Related: Hosting in Aus is ridiculously expensive too
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985137
How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
41–50 of 188 posts
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#42Country 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…
> Don't even get me started on the racists.
Skipping the Scandinavian-ish countries name a place less racist?
France? Asia? US? Africa? UK? India?
This discussion is about broadband not sure why you felt the need to Segway to this pointless point.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thankfully, the unhinged racist who drew it just shuffled off this mortal coil. He had many more which were just as terrible as this.
The cartoon wasn't racist, it's your own bias that makes you think it is.
An Aussie friend once told me about a friend of hers who killed a person while drink driving. She said "he (the victim) was only and Ab, but she (her friend) got done anyway" as if it was a perfectly normal thing to say.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#44Country 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.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#45Country 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…
> Don't even get me started on the racists. Skipping the Scandinavian-ish countries name a place less racist? France? Asia? US? Africa? UK? India? This discussion is about broadband not sure why you felt the need to Segway to this pointless point.
Luckily Australia is almost exclusively powered by excuses and whataboutery, not many people know that.
My comment added some context about one of the main protagonists of the story, I'm comfortable it's cromulent. If not, please, take my internet points.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#46As an Australian, I think it can be summed up by two reasons. 1. All large scale infrastructure rollouts are difficult and subject to problems and blowouts. 2. It was made a political issue. New government decided to make major revamps for no reason other than it was different to the previous government so they could use it as an election issue.
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).
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#47If 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 not anywhere near as important as roads and mines and coal.
It's an absolute tragedy for the nation that the original plan was changed by such ignorant luddites as Tony Abbott.
They made such an incredibly huge fuss about the cost, but only a month or two back they handed a $23 billion corporate tax cut over to companies and it barely made the newspaper.
I can tell you in no uncertain terms that I have not an atom of respect for any of our politicians.
Off topic, to me all part of the same story is my absolute quivering rage that we are literally giving away our natural resources for nothing or close to nothing whilst every litre of natural gas that can be sucked out of the ground is shipped to other countries.
Meanwhile the politicians ride around in helicopters, leech the taxpayer blind with their kingly entitlements and are genuinely surprised when there is outrage about it.
Seriously it is time for a citizens revolution. We need to take the country back from these idiots.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#48The government who changed away from FTTP is the more conservative (and pro small government) of the two major parties. As such, although I disagree, I can see why they may argue that it is not the governments responsibility to deliver broadband infrastructure and that private industry should pick up any slack. However they didn't argue this. They stuck with the concept of a nationally funded broadband network, but o…
FTTP or FTTN aside, aiming for 93% coverage in a country as sparsely populated as AU was a terrible idea to start with.
I understand the need to support rural areas but the the majority of the initial budget was to cover non-metropolitan areas and while the govt has been messing this up, private industry (TPG, First Path etc) managed to cover huge swaths of the population with little-to-no government assistance.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#49Country 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.
This is the place to comment on the article about how political incompetency hobbled Australia's broadband, right?
I understand if you are Australian and find the criticism uncomfortable, but it's a fair reflection of my experience.
My intent wasn't to suggest X is better than Australia, rather to inform the readership of HN that the political paralysis and ineptitude in this country is in no way limited to a single broadband project.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#50Hilariously, the conservative government currently in power made the following election campaign promises [0] [1] in 2013 (the election where they won government):
- Every household and business to have access to broadband with a download data rate of between 25 and 100 megabits per second by late 2016. [We're currently trailing Kenya]
- Key prices for a Coalition NBN will be capped nationally, ensuring Australians in metropolitan and regional areas alike can obtain services at fair prices. [For the low low price of $80 a month, on a 24 month contract, you can get 25Mbps/5Mbps from our two largest telcos: Telstra & Optus] [2] [3]
- "...unshackle the competitive telecom market that Labor tried to stamp out, and reduce the cost of the NBN to prudent levels." [Because of the NBN wholesale cost structure and network inter-connect structure, our retail ISPs are rapidly consolidating. We're likely to have three left standing by the end. To be fair, the latter wasn't the current government's fault.]
- They would complete the network roll-out at 2/3 the cost of the previous plan. [The Parliamentary Budget Office estimated in December 2016 that the total network cost will be $49 billion. However, the current government did make the entirely unsubstantiated and unquestioned claim that the $44B plan for FTTP was actually going to cost $90B.] [4]
So, things seem to be going to plan so far. The worst part about all this is that everyone seemed to eat this shit right up at the time. Even Australia's tech so-called 'journalists' were all going on about how the Coalition had presented a 'credible alternative'.
We deserve this, because we're stupid.
[0] PDF of election document: https://www.communications.gov.au/file/315/download?token=8O...
[1] HTML cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ih8ycW...
[2] https://www.telstra.com.au/broadband/nbn/nbn-plans
[3] http://www.optus.com.au/shop/broadband/home-broadband/plans?...
[4] http://www.news.com.au/national/nbn-cost-blowout-to-impact-b...