yARN: Is Turnbull just a little bit of history repeating?

With the past record of Senator Luddite, Helen Coonan and Tony Smith, we were all desperately hoping that Malcolm Turnbull might restore our perception from one of ignorance and incompetence to something like the Labour Party's motives, but with the addition of administrative and financial expertise.
Time is running out before the next election and a decade of Labour looks more likely by the day.

For goodness sake! Of course the broadband debate is stuck on financial issues. Why shouldn't financial issues be the main focus? After all the Australian taxpayer is paying for the NBN. Don't you think we're entitled to scrutinise the financial viability of the NBN?

If Turnbull is dumbing down the NBN debate, then tell us where exactly he is doing this? Is asking for a cost benefit analysis before spending $43 billion dumbing down the debate? Is asking whether everyone needs 100Mbps dumbing down the debate? Is pointing out that NBN Co is a government monopoly dumbing down the debate?

The only person dumbing down the debate is you, Mr Ramli.

@Edward
You aks "Why shouldn't financial issues be the main focus? " because we can't afford to have a company hold Australia's "Communication" infrastructure (not internet) be held back for another decade!
43 Billion over how many years is money well spent and needed!

The private sector won't (and hasn't) invest in this type of infrastructure and they shouldn't have to, that is what Governments are for and what my tax and every Australians tax goes towards.

If this doesn't happen now how much longer until the next government corrects the mistake of the monopoly strangling our fair and vibrant country!

LIbs are too short sighted and Turnbull apparently was born to argue for the sake of arguing.

@Edward

The point is that $43 billion over 8 years is pocket change compared to other government expenditure, especially given most of it will come out of a budget surplus.

If you think we won't need 100mbps soon, you are a fool. Home networks already run at this speed, and faster, indicating that there are services that can use this bandwidth and they will extend to the internet once the speed becomes available. One striking example is video conferencing which is currently limited by the 1mbps UPLOAD speed everyone has. Upload speeds are something the liberals NEVER mention.

The NBN will be government owned, yes. A monopoly is not the word I would use. If Telstra thought they could be competitive, they could keep their fixed line network running. Optus will no doubt keep it's cable offering. There are also several wireless services that may be able to provide comparable speed (though those speeds will be contingent on having a LOW number of users, otherwise the towers will become saturated or you will need towers on every street corner). The network will also be wholesale only. Meaning any company is able to put together a set of products using the network (phone, internet, TV, etc) and compete with similar or completely different offerings from other companies, for different prices. This is what drives competition and is exactly how the system works now (unless you go with Optus phone/internet).

Calling for a cost benefit analysis is pointless if you have already said you won't believe it if it comes out positive. These are the words of Malcolm Turnbull. He is so entrenched in "opposition" that he will stick to his beliefs regardless of the evidence presented.

With world organisations (like the UN) saying now is a good time to invest in broadband networks and will reap benefits for the economy, the state of the economy and current state of broadband in Australia, I say we just get on with the task as quickly as possible.

National Broad Network is future
Malcolm Turnbull is a laughing stock of technical community
he believe is 43 Billion Dollar Project is waste of taxpayer money
and Australian only need 12 Mbps download speed, now Cost Benefit analysis it will pay for it self in time. Australia current internet status is we are at Limit of Old Copper network

I see why the poor people cannot make it because everything is so high these days. And I'm doing the best I can just to make it in this world on this small income some of $703.00 a montn. And I'm trying to up date this laptop and I need help but I do not have the money justs to pay out of my poclet. Now I'm not asking for hand out but I need help.

the NBN must have as much bandwidth as possible, as much of the future will depend on remote provision of services. Medicine will consume huge amounts of bandwidth as people are treated at home instead of clogging up hospitals. Remote communities need medical centres with diagnostic services which can be provided over broadband. Better use of scarce medical resources while still providing services to the bush.. The private sector will not spend money unless they can get a return, we need infrastructure installed where the return is humanitarian not dollars. The cost is nothing yet the benefits are huge. Lets make it happen leveraging of every technology possible.

@Phil
Your comment about current domestic broadband technology upload speeds being too limited is exactly on the money.

Current methods and topologies for internet provision are of no use for the future, be they ADSL or wireless based because they use asynchronous methods for data flow to and from the internet, the "A" in ADSL means Asynchronous. In layman's terms this means that the upload speeds are always slower than the download speeds. Using wireless or copper POTS technologies will always bring this limitation. DSL is by contrast synchronous and data can travel at the same speed both ways, many business connections use this by having multiple leased lines that carry their data at the same speed both ways but on more than one copper pair, and at a much higher cost. This allows companies to host servers so that data can be provided to users, their uploads become our downloads.

For the Coalition to be able to provide this for private citizens, they would have to ensure that every home had 2 copper pairs connected and allow 12mbps in both directions, imagine how much more that would cost, and each wireless subscriber would need to have 2 wireless connections with the upload modem being capable of transmitting a stronger signal back to the tower in order to ensure good data integrity at that higher speed. Wireless upload speeds are also way slower than download speeds currently, and most likely always will be.

The reason the liberals NEVER mention upload speeds is simply because they don't understand any of it, or how it works and even if they did none would perceive a need to make it work better. there are no engineers in politics which is why they never know how to fix things effectively.

Continued...
Alternatively if we have the NBN as a FTTP service, it allows for synchronous data speeds as standard, for example 100Mbps in both directions and 1Gbps in the future, once again in both directions, uploading and downloading at the same speeds, as our fibre backbones already do, providing traffic at the same speed in both directions. Conversely Fibre to the Node or FTTN would not have provided us with Synchronous data links, so upload speeds would have been slower in that context. This means that somebody in the Labor/NBN construct was doing a fair job of due diligence when they made better technical decisions, or took good advice.

All the luddites would say that we probably will never need that, but how can they know if we have never had it before?

Unfortunately it would appear that Senator Stephen Conroy and his Labor colleagues are too busy doing their daily work, and trying to deal with Malcolm Turnbull's attacks, to actually have the time to clarify these huge technical differences directly to the voting public. And the media are not giving us the technical facts about the extreme differences between these proposed technology options and what they will really mean for our combined future opportunities, perhaps because journalists are not engineers either so they also don't really get it.

The opportunity for ordinary every day people to become content providers will be likely using the NBN, and earn money in ways not even perceived yet, writing and selling software directly to end users, creating music and film, artworks and other creative products on demand. Of course this must potentially be such a threat to the current producers of media and content, no wonder there is a sense that the likes of Malcolm Turnbull are trying to hobble the NBN on behalf of some unknown entities, using fear and loathing as his weapons of attack because they see the potential for such change and it scares them.

I live in a semi-rural area using a fixed wireless solution... it is awful! At 3pm when school finishes you can't use it because it is so saturated!

The Liberal plan seems to think that the internet is all about pulling content off the web. But this isn't the 1990s any more. The internet is now a two way street with the average user being a content creator rather than just a content consumer.

Content creations is where our information society will derive most of its value over the next century and I surely want to have the infrastructure in place that allows me to create value rather than just consume it.

If $43b pays wages for Australians then its money well spent.

If it pays international companies who grab the profits then it is not in any Australians interests.

Another issue is in the future - A monopoly will once again own the core infrastructure, if it gets privatised we will see the same competitor stranglehold repeated that we have now.

And this for a service that is barely there in comparison with other countries, and where we get one of the highest usage bills in the world.