Conroy confirms country areas to get NBN first

I never really thought the NBN was a major election issue, but this makes me very happy about the ultimate outcome.

All the talk of increased speeds is meaningless to me. My connection is fine as it is. Even where I used to live, behind a RIM where I could only access ADSL1, basing my vote on getting a faster internet connection would have seemed very selfish. However, a fibre-based broadband network is the right way to "move forward" (sorry) from copper; anything else would just be prolonging the inevitable.

What makes me really pleased is that in the public mind the NBN has now been framed in terms of equity, rather than just techheads complaining that their downloads don't happen fast enough.

This is another example of how the country's interests have been subjugated to political interests. Just the same way that the previously popular elected Prime Minister was rolled for internal party factors and not by the wider populace. So Australia with a population spreed of 68.4% living in major cities and 31.6% regional finds that the minority will be looked after before the rest of Australia. Unless I have missed it, I haven't seen anywhere in the NBN data that they planned to look after the country regions first because of any crying need. Particularly when one of the main thrusts of the NBN was about making Australian business more effective and competitive with some of our neighbours, surely then this approach is unbalanced. So for those of you who voted labour and live in the city, how do you feel now!

$42b for the NBN Rollout - yeah as if..
it costs $6k to have 50m in a 50mm tube laid, so whats that = to 350 thous kms and thats just the lead in size.

In the early days of analog phone services before most of us were born, human operators staffed rural and regional telephone exchanges and they connected phone calls, a very expensive inefficient and limited access process.

When exchanges became more automated, the customer was still billed at the high cost a human operator required. Digital exchanges were developed but costs were still left artificially high compared to the real cost of service provision, because now there were shareholders to appease (shareholders, the majority of whom took it in the proverbial when the GFC hit anyway and lost most of their ill gained spoils, due to the foolish and fickle nature of the fear and greed sentimentality they serve, and the bad choices therein), now with open access to optical fibre networks at both the wholesale and retail parts of our telecommunications infrastructure, the speed of which is not diminished by distance or mentality of marketing crews therein, it is possible to connect voice calls for the same cost regardless of distance, once that infrastructure is established. Therefore there is no case where one part of our nation is being asked to subsidize the voice call costs of another more remote part of our nation, any commentators or politicians that push such thinking going forward need first to seek to educate themselves about the change that the NBN brings to the entire nation equally because of the technology it now provides.

The exchanges are digital and have been for some time and most are fully installed and paid for, the current artificial call cost differences existed to keep country grandparents from exploiting a single voice switch for hours at a time while conversing with their families in cities or other towns, the NBN provides enough bandwidth and capacity that every family's loved ones can stay in touch without being financially rorted in times of loneliness, even if they soon want to utilise video alongside voice for such contacts. Anyone that dismisses such an important level of social equity in our near future has never been taught the importance of family and belonging, there is no price too high to pay and no risk of failure if it is done right. Social equity means fewer profits initially for the telcos but as business ramps up using the network in ever more creative ways the telcos will make money out of services and products that may not yet exist, as they adapt.

WOW sure I would love Fibre into my house ,but I think its a bit like a family that cannot feed the kids but still buying a new car, when we have such long waiting lists in the hospitals and every new road has a toll on it im not sure that I want to direct money to 18 year old kids downloading movies in seconds rather than just twice as fast as they can view them.

Fibre up all businesses, Unis and Hospitals by all means but it will be lost on most of the people in my street.

Stuart

Response to Stuart: it wont be lost to any people on my street and its a pretty damn long street. I would say at least 90% uptake here in my street easily. It will go off like a rocket!