NBN for the dumpster?
Any technically savvy person, if they have looked at the fine print of the Coalition broadband policy, will notice the fibre to the house promise of the current NBN plan has become a minimum 12Mbps promise.
With a budget changed from $43 billion to start to $6.3 billion to start one can see this ‘so called’ high speed network will either be extremely small or extremely slow. On top of that, it’s disastrous news for Telstra shareholders who were, under the previous plan, going to receive a windfall of $11 billion dollars for decommissioning some rusty copper network cables from the 1930’s.
Back in June I pointed out what a bad deal this whole NBN thing was for tax payers
Talking to a customer the other day, he raised some important problems for rolling out any kind of NBN. To lay it to a customers door requires access to the cable pits the existing cables were laid in, or else where do you put it? But there’s a problem for starter. There will be a lot of cable trunks where the cable wasn’t done into a lovely accessible pit. They were just dug straight in, sometimes under existing structures. Since that time even more structures have been added. A lot of the copper was put in before whole suburbs existed and the oldest suburbs will be the worst, with roads or whole building sitting on top of the cable pits.
Another problem is that in many places there is one pit for every two houses. The logistics of that are staggering.
The longer you think, the more you dig and talk to people the more I see two glaring truths.
1. The value of the current copper network is huge. To put a replacement cost on it might be impossible, but for certain it was sold at a small fraction of it’s true worth.
2. Tax payers are now faced with two options. Average bandwidth for a very long time - or - a very large bill.
And I don’t mean just large, like a fat aunty. I mean a truly, tremendously, humongously, stupendously massively, huge bill. A bill that’s a hundred stories high, with a portico bigger than the Opera House, that needs it’s own nuclear reactor just to run the lights and has gargoyles on the roof.
Something that can be passed on to your children.
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