NBN Rollout Scrapped

[Tisme]

Here you are my dear friend Rumpole ... I love you baby

 

[drsmith]

Only to a rusted on Liberal like yourself. You'd have to provide factual data to backup your bent, and I mean all the facts none of the emotional claptrap.

Mob rule already tags Fizzer as the architect of failure with the NBN,

A personal attack on the basis of partisanship from someone who only a few posts later posts an image that's as partisan as it gets.

The history of the NBN and this thread dates from well before you joined this forum. That mob rule (as you put it) in 2013 was in part a judgment on the lack of progress with the rollout of FTTP under the then Labor government.

 

[Smurf1976]

Let's not rewrite history.

It was a train wreck from the outset.

Sure was.

A grubby deal to sell the people's asset, Telstra, with no obligation on the private owners to keep maintaining and upgrading infrastructure thus inevitably leaving future taxpayers to foot the bill one way or another.

Just like Pacific National did with the railways in Tasmania.

Just like various players have done with power supply in Vic and SA.

Privatisation of natural monopoly infrastructure has always been a case of privatising the profits and socialising the costs. Same debacle happens every time with only the details differing, private owners run it to the ground and fail to invest in new technology thus leaving taxpayers to foot the bill. The NBN is just another one to add to the list of such happenings.

We are now reaping the "benefits" of having sold Telstra's assets which were once government owned. Now the taxpayer gets to pay, again, to build a communications network. Someone's benefiting but it's not the average working taxpayer that's for sure.

As for fixing it, well that's a technical question not a political or financial one and like most such things is best done by keeping politicians as far away as possible.

If it was up to me then I'd create a national backbone infrastructure between major points (eg between capital cities) and leave the states to roll out the rest of the network. It was already being built in Tas years before the NBN came along after all and the other states could presumably get it done too (and if they didn't the economic pain would force them pretty quickly).

 

[SirRumpole]

Here you are my dear friend Rumpole ... I love you baby

View attachment 85211

Thanks, I'm quite fond of you too.

The NBN is the biggest infrastructure stuff up this country have ever seen. It's all down to that Abbott bastard who wanted to use it as a bat to bash Labor instead of getting behind the idea and making it work.

The worst politician this country has ever seen.

 

[Logique]

The NBN, like the NDIS, was Labor big-noting itself, but leaving a Coalition government to pick up the pieces and fund it.

Now Labor has the hide to attack the NBN! It's politically motivated.

Labor's NBN, if it proceeded at all, would have delivered fibre-to-the-premises in metropolitan areas, and then gone belly-up before the regions got a thing.

 

[Smurf1976]

Coalition flogged off Telstra and presumably hoped they wouldn’t be in government when it came time to cough up the $ to fix the inevitable problems resulting from the way it was done.

Labor came up with the NBN but not the money to pay for it.

Both are duds in different ways.

Selling Telstra without a means to both economically enable and actually require the company to keep up with changing technology was the ultimate cause of the situation we have today.

Politically it was a Coalition government which made that blunder but it’s entirely plausible that given the right (wrong) circumstances Labor would have done the same thing. Only likely difference is that Labor probably wouldn’t have agreed to shut down a completely unrelated Sunday night radio program on commercial stations in order to get the legislation through but they could well have done something else equally as silly.

Both are duds, all that differs is in the detail and surrounding circumstances at the time.

 

[SirRumpole]

Only likely difference is that Labor probably wouldn’t have agreed to shut down a completely unrelated Sunday night radio program on commercial stations in order to get the legislation through

Could you expand on that, I must have missed it ?

 

[Smurf1976]

Could you expand on that, I must have missed it ?

Back in the 1990’s there was a national talkback radio program on commercial FM stations on the subject of sex. People phoned up and it went into considerable detail on the subject. It aired from 10pm - midnight or thereabouts (Eastern states time).

Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine wasn’t at all keen on that radio program but the Coalition needed his vote to get the Telstra sale through the Senate.

Personal contacts in the radio industry tell me that whilst not technically censored it was the old “resign first or be sacked” type of scenario at play and so it was scrapped.

 

[drsmith]

Back in the 1990’s there was a national talkback radio program on commercial FM stations on the subject of sex. People phoned up and it went into considerable detail on the subject. It aired from 10pm - midnight or thereabouts (Eastern states time).

Was that the one where the host was referred to as Dr Feelgood?

I remember one disgruntled lady getting on air to complain about her boyfriend farting in bed while she was performing fellatio. She went on to describe how she could hear him laughing after she exited the bedroom and closed the door.

Back to the topic at hand, the Howard government should have structurally separated the wholesale and retail elements of Telstra and privatised the retail elements only. Once Labor was in office, that was done and from there, they should have never gone down the path of establishing a new government wholesale owned entity and certainly should never have mandated the entire fixed line build to be FTTP nor pretended it stacked up economically. As for the MTM rollout under the current government, it too has been rushed but it's made much greater progress than the Labor FTTP version.

To this day, it still doesn't stack up economically and the inevitable write-down is coming.

 

[Tisme]

The NBN, like the NDIS, was Labor big-noting itself, but leaving a Coalition government to pick up the pieces and fund it.

Now Labor has the hide to attack the NBN! It's politically motivated.

Labor's NBN, if it proceeded at all, would have delivered fibre-to-the-premises in metropolitan areas, and then gone belly-up before the regions got a thing.

You don't really believe that do you. Surely you're just baiting for the sake of being contrary?

 

[Logique]

The NBN - designed on the back of an envelope by Senator Conroy. You bet I believe it.

 

[Tisme]

Even rolling out Geminis instead of Commodores has gone way over the original MKII FTTP $43bn Labor promised and indicative of LNP poor fiscal management the doubling the LNP election promise of $29.5bn.

LNP have more than doubled the net national debt big black hole, doubled the dumbed down NBN cost and sent the average IQ in parliament into double digits.

 

[Tisme]

Thanks, I'm quite fond of you too.

The NBN is the biggest infrastructure stuff up this country have ever seen. It's all down to that Abbott bastard who wanted to use it as a bat to bash Labor instead of getting behind the idea and making it work.

The worst politician this country has ever seen.

That's a bit harsh on Wilson Tuckey isn't it?

 

[Smurf1976]

The NBN - designed on the back of an envelope by Senator Conroy. You bet I believe it.

A big part of the problem with the NBN is that money seems to not be a consideration.

Prior to the emergence of the NBN, here in Tasmania we were already rolling out a FTTP network servicing commercial and residential customers.

This was an initiative of the power industry and from the very beginnings an absolute focus was that it had to be done reasonably cheaply. First reason was because it needed to compete with Telstra's existing copper network and ADSL services (the intent was that consumers would pay significantly less with FTTP than they were paying for ADSL) and secondly because there wasn't really any money available to built it with anyway.

So it was the same old scenario that has always been the case with electricity and now applied to communications. Don't have any money and need to charge consumers much for the service than any alternative otherwise they won't want it = need to find ways to do it cheaply but without compromising the engineering.

So we had Hydro Tasmania doing most of the network design and Aurora Energy building it (both companies being 100% owned by the Tas government). To sell the services there was a telecommunications retailer set up as a joint venture of Hydro Tasmania, Aurora Energy and AAPT (the latter being a private company).

Then along came the NBN and the Australian Government's request for proposals. Tasmania was the only state to put a proposal forward, no other state did so far as I'm aware, and that proposal was to spend $400 million and connect the majority (200,000) of Tasmanian homes and businesses to FTTP and use wireless or satellite services for the remainder and have it completely built within 5 years. This was in effect a continuation and acceleration of what was already being done - doing it more quickly being possible if money was available.

FTTN was always rejected as being both inferior and having the complexity and risk of dealing with existing infrastructure that was known to be in poor condition in many cases plus the asbestos problem was also well known long before it hit the news. So there was no use of that in the initial pre-NBN build and it wasn't proposed to use it for the $400 million NBN proposal either.

Long story short - NBN decided to do things their own way and have spent some pretty serious $ doing so which far exceeds what was proposed by the power industry which considered that the network needed to be technically robust, using FTTP not FTTN, but it had to be cheap enough that financing was practical and consumers would want to use it. There's no point providing communications that are too expensive for consumers to use just as there's no point generating power that's too expensive for industry exposed to international competition to be viable. Nothing new about that, that has always been the case.

So the proposal was ultimately rejected in favour of NBN's own model. The power industry down here has got some work out of it as a contractor doing the physical delivery but that's it.

Perhaps I'm biased but I just don't see how it all adds up. Looking at the cost of the network being built versus what can reasonably be charged for services it seems to expensive to me.

 

[SirRumpole]

That's a bit harsh on Wilson Tuckey isn't it?

Forgot about him, but he never got to PM.

 

[greggles]

I recently switched from ADSL2 to the NBN at the urging of my ISP (TPG). The speeds I am getting are no better than ADSL (11Mbps up, 1.2Mbps down) and the amount of downtime I have experienced since switching is both ridiculous and unacceptable.

In short, the NBN is both a disappointment and a rort IMO. I was better off with ADSL2.

 

[sptrawler]

We have ADSL2, but I see a node going in around the corner, so it obviously isn't far away.

I'm happy with ADSL2, our daughter lives with us and two grandkids, they run netflix I just browse and don't have a problem.
It will be interesting to see what transpires, with the "upgrade" I didn't want and we shouldn't be paying for.

 

[Logique]

In most areas they're switching off the telstra copper network after 18 months of NBN availability.

So there's no choice but to migrate sooner or later.

Areas receiving fixed wireless NBN will mostly retain the copper wire network for telephone.

 

[Tisme]

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/accc-abandons-plan-to-expose-nbn-rsps-cvc-buys-480205

ACCC abandons plan to expose NBN RSPs' CVC buys

But NBN Co itself must supply better data.
The ACCC has backed away from a plan to publicly reveal how much connectivity virtual circuit bandwidth is being bought by NBN retail service providers.

 

[Tisme]

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/bu...olve-his-internet-crisis-20171231-h0btca.html

BN protester's problem solved by police called to remove him from Telstra store

When Matt Dooley refused to leave a Telstra store after months of battling with the telco, the last people he might have expected to fix his problem were the police called to remove him from the store.

Having spent hours on the phone to Telstra trying to get his NBN connection properly installed, he had had enough and staged an impromptu sit-in at the Marrickville Metro store.

View image on Twitter

https://twitter.com/mrkringerz/status/946613049061806081

Matt Dooley@mrkringerz

After 4 mths and no help whatsoever, my gf and I staged a sit in to demand our case be looked into. The @Telstra shop called the police to have us removed and the police took our side and negotiated the bundle. Its all still barely working and the case manager refuses to call me.

"The cops kind of took our side," Mr Dooley said. "They understood. They used their excellent negotiating skills to negotiate what I hadn't been able to in the last four months.

"One was very technically minded and got it. He knew what we needed.

"This cop was running back and forth between us to negotiate so we didn't have to talk to each other, talking about cables and routers and modems."

Mr Dooley said he and his girlfriend sat by the front door as the police moved back and forth, negotiating between the two parties before eventually solving the issue.

29 Dec

Matt Dooley@mrkringerz
After 4 mths and no help whatsoever, my gf and I staged a sit in to demand our case be looked into. The @Telstra shop called the police to have us removed and the police took our side and negotiated the bundle. Its all still barely working and the case manager refuses to call me. pic.twitter.com/Rjb6z6ZEv7

https://twitter.com/mrkringerz/status/946619679535013888

Matt Dooley@mrkringerz

@nswpolice Using their excellent negotiation skills to get @telstra staff to actually resolve a basic broadband issue. A big win for community policing, a giant fail for Telstra's Terrible Teams!!!! @unabutorac

"Lo and behold the next day there was a Star Track Express delivered to our house with all the things we needed and just all sorted out," he said.

"As a result of police coming to the store we had internet that afternoon and cable the next day."

The successful negotiating of the police ended a months-long saga for Mr Dooley, who had been trying to get internet at his new house since September.

Working from home in the film and television industry, he needed good and reliable upload capacity so chose an NBN plan through Telstra.

"It was horribly mishandled," he said. "A handful of technicians came and didn't install it properly. Everyone just didn't know what they were doing."

He tried calling their support line, making over 80 calls to the telco in a bid to rectify the issue. He said he was often passed between four or five people who were all unable to help.

"The aim has got to be for Telstra to get rid of you. They just don't care. If you call and ask to speak to sales you'll get through to someone right away."

He took his complaints to the industry ombudsman but was found that he was just one of many putting in complaints about their telco provider.

"They were so overwhelmed by complaints they couldn't do anything effectively. They told me they were backlogged by a month of cases they can't get through."

"I was temporarily disabled at the time. I had broken my leg and I was losing thousands of dollars in money not being able to do work because had no internet from home.

"I'm convinced it affected my mental health. I got so angry and frustrated. It sounds really whingey but internet is so essential but also my lifeline for work and being laid up for months," he said.

"What really got frustrating and got me down was in the end there was no one accountable."

After $3000, 100 hours on the phone and a temporary ADSL connection, Mr Dooley had had enough.

With a still-healing leg, Mr Dooley went with his girlfriend to the Telstra Marrickville Metro store on Wednesday.

Although he had managed to get the NBN cable installed, he still needed a modem, router and cable.

"I said just give me that stuff at least and I'll run it out the window. They said they couldn't help and I said we're not leaving so they called security."

While he was lucky to have three cops step in to assist, Mr Dooley said that there were others not so fortunate.

"I think about people who don't know about tech who are elderly or don't speak the language properly. They would never be able to deal with this. What really got frustrating and got me down was in the end there was no one accountable.

"[While we were in the store], an elderly man came and congratulated us saying 'I think it's great what we're doing'," Mr Dooley said.

"A whole lot of people came up and told us their horror stories of telstra problems."

Telstra is investigating the incident.