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Last week, the Australian Government announced that the national broadband network (NBN) would be built by none-other than itself, and not one of the various applicants that had been jockeying for the job over the last 6 months or so.
And we all rejoiced!
Well, most of us anyway. There are the usual short-sighted fools who think that national infrastructure can be built ‘for-profit’ and run as a straight-up business. What rubbish! Rail and road infrastructure certainly doesn’t operate that way (look at the high rate of failed privatisation of these to see what the alternatives are), and the NBN is the ‘highway’ for the future. The rate of return on this kind of infrastructure is difficult to calculate, but is no doubt too slow (or too hard to capture for profit) for most private companies.
Much of the negative analysis I’ve read fails to see the add-on benefit to the economy from the presence of such infrastructure, and none of us really can see just how much technology will change in the next decade or so. My bet is that we’ll look back on the current adsl network (and Telstra monopoly) as an amusing yet horrifying chapter in our communications history, much like we laugh at the thoughts that a 14.4 modem was all we were ever going to need a decade earlier! 43billion is a lot of money, but what was the equivalent cost of putting in our national road infrastructure? These things don’t come cheap!
The benefits of having Telstra out of the picture are also great. It has single-handedly held us back to maximise its own profits. I can’t wait to see them compete on real terms with the other telcos – consumers will be the winner.
It’s nice to have something positive to talk about, in terms of broadband in Australia, so here’s hoping our undemocratic senate pass the ‘ok’ without any problems.
- Scoobs
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