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The tl;dr is that Australia started a fibre-to-the-premises project for the whole country (93% of premises, plus rural 7% on wireless), then a conservative gove
by ClassyJacket 9y ago
The tl;dr is that Australia started a fibre-to-the-premises project for the whole country (93% of premises, plus rural 7% on wireless), then a conservative government got in power and decided to deliberately destroy it. To do this, they changed it to fibre-to-the-node (DSL) instead. Instead of gigabit to the home, they're spending more money providing people with connections anywhere between 4mbps and 100 at the absolute most, with no possibility of upgrades. The cost to do this, is, of course, far more money in the long term than installing the fibre. Some people in metropolitan areas will get connected to the existing coaxial network, which is going to have huge contention problems as it's stretched far beyond what it was ever intended for.
It's the biggest trainwreck of an infrastructure project in Australia's history and will set every person and business back for decades, and the blame lies squarely with the Liberal Party.
The current head of the project has gone on record saying that Australians don't want fast internet and wouldn't use it if it was free.
- vacri 9y ago> Some people in metropolitan areas will get connected to the existing coaxial network, which is going to have huge contention problems as it's stretched far beyond what it was ever intended for. s/some/most/. HFC is the predominant plan for most of the capital cities (I think not... hobart? or was it adelaide?).
- Retric 9y agoWait, if the Conservative party decided to destroy it how is that the fault of the Liberal Party?
- ClassyJacket 9y agoBecause it's the same party. The Liberal Party is the name of the conservative party.
- vacri 9y agoIt's not even a misnomer to our American friends. The Australian main conservative party is more liberal than the American main liberal party.
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- perilunar 9y agoThe Liberal Party of Australia is a conservative party. (The ACCC really should force them to change their name due to false advertising)
- jimmux 9y agoThere's an argument to be made that they are socially conservative but economically liberal. That seems to be less true over time, however.
- redcap 9y agoThe Liberal party is the conservative party. No Conservative party in Australia AFAIK. The Liberal party is broadly social-conservative, pro-business. The Labor party is broadly speaking socially liberal and pro-labour.
- cknight 9y agoYou're on the money, but just a bit out of date. We have a (very) new far-right party called the Australian Conservatives now. The creation of a former Liberal party senator.
- Sag0Sag0 9y agoAhh, make australia great again.
- perilunar 9y ago> No Conservative party in Australia AFAIK There's the Family First Party, who merged with Cory Bernardi's Australian Conservatives. There's also the Christian Democratic Party (Fred Nile).
- rstuart4133 9y ago> The Liberal party is the conservative party. No Conservative party in Australia AFAIK. You a little behind the times. That was true many years ago, in the Fraser years. Now it's "The The Liberal party is the conservative party. There is currently no 'John Stuart Mill' liberal party in Australia".
- NamTaf 9y agoAustralia has what's referred to as 'big-L' Liberals, who are the conservative side, as opposed to 'small-l' liberals as you'd commonly describe 'liberal politics', i.e. progressive. Our centre-right party is the Liberal party, our centre-left is called Labor.
- masklinn 9y ago"Liberals" does not mean "left-leaning" in most of the commonwealth or even the world outside the US, "social-liberal" does but "liberal" on its own is generally center-right and sometimes "conservative-right", the latter being the case for the Liberal Party of Australia (which always existed in opposition to Labour).
- aplummer 9y agoThis is an extremely biased and misleading take on the situation. Look at premises passed when the LNP came into power. https://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco2/documents/nbn-rollout-metrics/nbn-rollout-metrics-19102017.pdf https://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco2/documents/nbn-ro... Total activated in mid 2014, ~250k. That is completely nuts, you make it sound like this was a steady ship the LNP tipped over.
- qzervaas 9y agoIt was an unsteady ship that could be righted with some well-known and publicised fixes. Instead they filled it with more water and blamed everybody but themselves.
- boyter 9y agoThey did have to setup the whole company, negotiate with Telsta, run the backbone's and set everything else up. They were behind on connections its true, but that was largely due to Telstra having to remediate the ducts filled with asbestos which halted large portions of the rollout. Had they continued I expect that the ramp up would have been similar to New Zealand.
- zmmmmm 9y agoWhat is biased is citing premises passed at an really phase in a project which deliberately planned to roll out difficult sites first. Of course there were not many premises passed, that is meaningless without context.
- aplummer 9y agoIt wasn't though. The rollout follows political seats exactly to the street. In Brisbane this means that it followed the border of marginal ALP seats that cross the river and back again instead of doing adjacent houses. It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.
- aplummer 9y agoI don't even vote LNP, but you have to wonder about the efficiency of a rollout where you get faster internet driving an hour out of Melbourne than Fitzroy or a lot of the CBD. For a project originally estimated at 4.7 then 15 then 42 billion, dense paying customers early should probably have been prioritised.
- flukus 9y agoDon't forget the National Party who were instrumental in kowtowing to the liberals to build what they originally coined as "Fraudband". They had a once in a lifetime opportunity to deliver a decent internet service to much of rural Australia and they threw it away because it was a Labor idea.