ELECTION 2010 EXCLUSIVE: Face-to-face with Senator Stephen Conroy
- 19 August, 2010 09:30
- Comments 8
In rolling out the Building the Education Revolution (BER) fund the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said some mistakes and cost overruns are perfectly acceptable given how important it was at the time, especially given the GFC. Do you think it’s therefore reasonable for the NBN’s budget to go a little over?
SENATOR STEPHEN CONROY (SC): No look we don’t believe that’s an issue. If you look at what we’ve achieved in Tasmania, if you look at the Telstra deal – this has always been something that could be built within budget. If you talk to people in the sector they will always tell you $43 billion was always an outer edge.
So does that mean you would guarantee there will be absolutely no overrun beyond $43 billion?
SC: Well as I said the deal with Telstra has got us well, well short of that. The experts in the industry say it is a $4-6 billion saving. I can’t confirm those figures but a range of experts have suggested the figure of saving and that puts us well under the $43 billion.
So you would personally guarantee that?
SC: Well I’m personally responsible to the Australian public. We put forward a program and will be judged on that and I am ultimately the person who is overseeing the project so I’ll be held responsible. But if you look at the rollout so far, if you look at the way the rollout is designed, if you look at the savings that are potentially going to come from the Telstra deal we’re confident that we can be within budget at the end of the process.
On filtering, the issue is dead in the Senate regardless of who wins thanks to the Opposition, the Greens and Senator Nick Xenophon vowing to vote against it. Is there any way you would bring mandatory filtering in without a vote in the Senate?
SC: Genuinely, I don’t believe we can, I don’t think there’s a backdoor way we could do it. I think the only way we could do it is through Parliament. But what you’ve seen is three major ISPs in this country announce they’re going to introduce [content filtering] voluntarily and I call on all of the other ISPs to introduce it. It’s been introduced in many, many Western countries. 70-75 per cent of Australians are going to quickly discover there is no impact on Internet speed. 1/70th of a blink of an eye if you want to be an engineer, but that’s not a noticeable impact for an end-user.
So you would promise not to bring in mandatory filtering via any other method apart from Parliament?
SC: Absolutely, I’m a democrat first and foremost. And I believe this is a debate that needs to be held on the floor. I urge other companies to follow Optus, Primus and Telstra’s lead on this but I believe it’s important for the Parliament to have its say on this. I’m relaxed about that and I’m a democrat at the end of the day.
NBN Co CEO, Mike Quigley, has said he will provide you with a business case and await your approval to release it. Will you do so?
SC: No, I’ve said very clearly we will not be releasing the business case.
Why not?
SC: Because we didn’t release Telstra’s when it was in public hands, we don’t release Australia Post’s and we’ve got no intention of releasing NBN Co’s.
But can you understand the public angst over the fact that there’s no cost-benefit analysis or business case for this investment?
SC: This is entirely a manufactured, confected debate started by the Liberal Party to try and slow down [the NBN] so they could claim coming into this election that there’d been no connections. They wanted a delay simply for political reasons.
But I’ve spoken to people in the industry that support the NBN while wanting a business case or cost-benefit analysis.
SC: Waste of time, waste of effort, waste of money.
So you say there’s no one who genuinely believes in getting it without an ulterior motive?
SC: Waste of time, waste of effort, waste of money. We’re actually building the NBN as we said we would and as the Australian people elected us to.
State of the IT Channel 2012: Register your view and win a Toshiba tablet!
Come socialise with us! Facebook | LinkedIn
- Bookmark this page
- Share this article
- Got more on this story? Email ARN
- Follow ARN on twitter
- Premier Media Group Fast Study
- What is Wireless 2.0
- Churchtown Primary School UK Primary School Chooses Aerohive's Reliable, Manageable, Scalable and Economical Controller-less Wireless LAN Architecture
- Aberdeen Group: Building Business Resilience Through Active Archive
- Market Potential-Strategy Guide to the Active Archive Market
-
Security Manager's Journal: Should physical security belong to us?
-
Opinion: Is Google evil? The jury is out
-
Synnex Australia to distribute Toshiba
-
Lenovo awarded NSW DET netbook contract
-
Synnex Australia to distribute Toshiba
Get exclusive access to ARN's news, research and invitation only events. 
Comments
Akira Doe
I wish you had asked Conroy about the impact on speeds now that the NBN is able to deliever 1Gbit speeds given that the "1/70th of the blink of an eye" speed impact he referred to was based of testing a filtering solution on a simulated 1.5mbit connection in Telstra's test environment and didn't actually involve any customers.
It's very irresponsible of him to use the results of a small scale lab test to justify filtering entire customer bases at the ISP level.
twig
Or what he thinks of the "beat it Conroy" flash game where people can punch him in the face
David of Emerald
Hasn't Conroy heard of democracy? Or was he a failure in the alp state education system?
Clinton
"Waste of time, waste of effort, waste of money."
For a business plan?
This is a scheme that was put together during 2 flights between state capitals by PM Rudd and Mr Conroy.
Dear lord the rorts and blow outs that are going to come of this....
mg
To give you an example Akira, Reliance Communications ran URL blacklist filtering for over 6 million live users, with full analysis, for a minimum period of 3 months recently, and will be next week switching this URL filtering across their entire user network.
Reliance has over 105 million telecoms users, however only somewhat north of 20 million are confirmed Internet users today, with world's fastest levels of growth.
Using standard ISP/telco/carrier level URL blacklist filtering technology (not proxy based / not inline / not tunnelled/not hybrid based), they achieved the following stats:
- 3000 URL blacklist run (tested 100k URLs for scoping)
-All connections for that 6.5 million user segment, all domestic and international routes
- Incl. Google, You Tube, Yahoo, Orkut, MSN, Facebook etc URLs to maximise scoping
- BGP pre-filters with zero latency or delay
-Less than 1% of Internet Requests needed to go via the filter
(BGP based Request Routing – ignores non-blacklist related destinations)
- 100% accuracy
- No inbound (user requested) content travels via the filter
- Actual filtering time at filter required averaged 4ms
- Again, this 4ms only need apply to less than 1% of Internet Requests
- 4ms is less than 1/70th of a blink of an eye... (Blink av. 350ms)
- Average that across all Requests and you have microns of added time per Request…
- 6.5 million users is about twice the size of Bigpond
- Full Reliance user base is more than all Aussie Net users...
- No single point of failure (not inline)
- Failover between gateways where required
- Architecture validated to handle >100 million users...
- Intercepts Internet Requests from all connection modes
- Hardware and systems installation costs for 6 mio user less than $20K USD - add vendor fees to that (very low per annum)
These atre the details available to me today.
Reliance and the govt both know of circumvention methods, and have proceeded in any case. Management and admin costs will naturally vary per ISP, location, scope, actual requirements etc. That is normal telecom economies.
Hope that helps you to better understand what suitable and modern technologies are already delivering major user base ISPs today. Just as applicable to any sized ISP or telco, just the implementation costs go down…
The 1/70th of a blink of an eye analogy (approx. 5ms) is quite real, viable and validated, and easily replicated if the correct technologies and methodologies are implemented. That really should not surprise many people, as Internet related technologies are developing and improving in leaps and bounds on a continual basis, and that includes contentious filtering technologies and models.
The ISP will at the end of the day choose the technology and implementation model that best suits their requirements and costs model at the time, which means that none of them are tied in to any technology previously tested.
Cheers
mg
mossrocket
I love the internet.
I started with slow dialup - it was awesome!
then i paid more for faster dial up - it was fantastic!
then I paid more for adsl - wow!
then i paid more for adsl2+ - holy cow!
But I paid more money each time - and now it's at a point that I will not pay more money for internet access - even if it speeds up 10x.
I'm currently connected to the internet at 8Mbps - compared to the 1.5Mbps that I had with ADSL1 - it is blisteringly fast - but at a price.
Most Australian's do NOT have access to the really fast internet speeds already available in Australia as the cost is prohibitive to most households. We are charged way to much money for the data we download (and upload sometimes!) compared to other OECD countries - this is the real issue.
Oh - and latency - I was thinking - Imagine every household in Australia accessing the internet at the same time - the bottlenecks will be incredible if anyone is trying to access any overseas hosted website (and that would be about 99.9% of the internet).
Sen. Conroy's NBN = a badly thought out FAIL
Marcus
I have read many frustrating interviews with Conroy where the interviewer didn't challenge him or ask him difficult questions.
David Ramli, thank you for doing this, your questions were very well targeted.
mg
Imagine every household in Australia accessing the internet at the same time anytime today - the bottlenecks would be incredible if anyone is trying to access any overseas hosted website.
Why would the NBN change that one way or the other, except that locally hosted or sourced content, BTW far more than 0.1%, would arrive far far far faster...
Economies of scale always work drive down per unit pricing in an open market, which we have now due to Conroy's regulation of Telstra.
One thing I can confirm: All Australians who use the internet have access to far faster speeds today than when I first started using it, and there is no reason or logic in that performance progression stopping today. None. Zilch. Niente. Null. Zero. Rien de tout!
Post new comment