Conroy: Low Armidale NBN connection reports “misleading and ironic”

Clearly these folks don't want the NBN, but Conroy's going to make them have it... by taking away their copper network! Then he'll turn around and say, wow, what a great success the NBN is when, the reality is, people will have been forced into taking it, rather than having an actual choice. What a farce. It will be good to see this minority Labour government voted out at the next election.

Yep Rob, these folks do not want the NBN. The numbers are compelling: Only 88% registered interest in having the NBN connected.

Far too low, you need at least 185% of residents to register interest in order to proceed...??

How is life as a Coalition staffer Rob, do they pay you well to promulgate Coalition doomsday messages on the comments sections?

Cheers mate, have a nice day...

One eyed 'Not a staffer' is typical yob that does not allow others to have their own opinion and has to accuse them of working for the enemy. Freedom of speech and opinion is our mainstay so I say without influence that flagging interest is a far cry from signing up
as what happened in Tasmania and if that trend does not change then we are in for an awful expensive white elephant.

@ Not a staffer... here we go from an other labour stooge.. bludger.. who wants to do nothing and live life on the taxes that we pay...
what option does these 88% people.. flagging an interest when there ar eno viable options means nothing..
Start earning a dollar and start contributing to the economy positively and not waste our hand earn money..
Think about what you have done before talking about what how good this $44B "investment" is..
I am product to be a hard working , Tax Paying Australian.. who used to vote labour till his Moronic train of Gillard+Conroy came along..

I dont think you deserve a choice if you want to stay with copper.

Optic fibre allows for higher bandwidth and lower ping. There is no real reason why anyone would want to stay with copper over fibre other than nostalgia.

What we have is an emotional response rather than a logical response to a serious issue. For example, Aussie said "Start earning a dollar" to "Not a staffer", this is an ad hominem, and is emotionally driven from no factual basis as the working status of "Not a staffer" is unknown.

If you think that political parties and lobby groups aren't paying people to push there agenda on the internet you are deluded. Believe none of what hear and half of what you see.

Looks like the anti everything brigade is out.
So where is the figures backing their claim that Armadale folk don't want Optic Fibre. At a guess most wouldn't even know what it is.
People objected when power lines were first installed. The fear amongst the masses when the first motor cars appeared. Some objected to the Sydney Harbour Bridge being built. Remember the outcry over the Sydney Opera House, now something every Australian boasts about.
There will always be objectors to anything done.
High Speed cable based communications is not a luxury, it is as essential as having power and water provided to every home.
Australia cannot afford to be left behind.
Once again I state that Telstra's predecessor Telecom were ready to roll out optic fibre 14 years ago and didn't because the Howard government stopped it.
If they were allowed to proceed we wouldn't be having this disagreement and we would be light years ahead of the world. Now we have to play catch up.

I live in central Armidale and customer service for my ISP, AAPT, haven't even heard of the 'NBN'. It's not surprising uptake numbers are low!

I thought the heading was referring to Conroy's comments, that would have been unusual for him. not.

Maybe he would like to remember his revelation just prior to the Election that NBN will deliver 1Gig to every home, knowing full well the average punter would not know the high cost of such a service nor it would be practically useless for the foreseeable future with few (any?) applications in the home requiring such bandwidth.

Or perhaps his insistence that there will be huge advances in medical and education from the NBN when he knows improvements to existing technologies can cover the applications much more inexpensively, now.

and this is without referring to his Internet Filter or Set Top Box fiascoes.

@Not a Staffer. Registering an interest does not translate into taking a service. Ask your mate Conroy about lack of takeup in Tasmania.... which I'm sure he'll put a spin on.

I just love how all the far right muppets, refer to/consider themselves rational, reality check, etc... LOL..!

Talk about plankers...!

Wait till you get the cost to you for the NBN then you like any intelligent person would say - Conroy is a complete boofhead if he thinks we are going to pay such high fees for this crappy service

I dont care who knocks it. In my household we need the speed that NBN potentially has. We use 9 computers (including a file server)between 6 people with a usage that exceeds 500GB per month. NBN keep rolling out that fibre. You got 14 years worth of work to catch up on thanks to the Liberals

Do any of you understand the initial trial process?
You first had to be an existing customer of one of the 4 IPS's running the initial trials, (iiNet, Internode, iPrimus and Telstra).
@Kris, this is why your ISP doesn't know about the trials.

Secondly, you had to return a consent form before the 7 September last year to have the fibre connected to your home as part of the trial.

This is only the trial stage, NBN doesn't become commercially available in Armidale until September, then we will start to see what the actual uptake is.

@cracker, what is crappy about having a high speed, low latency internet connection? Copper is at it's limit, and wireless is too unreliable. Prices are not that bad, if you consider what you are getting. You can't expect to get faster speeds and more data for less than what you are paying now.

@rational, maybe you can't see any practical use you higher bandwidth for home users. Do we all remember the famous quote from Bill Gates from the early eighties when talking about RAM, “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”