What gets me is that there is no way that productivity will ever be increased to warrant a $50 billion pricetag.
I know multitudes of small business owners, none of which require anything greater than what they currently have.
I know many uni students, who are looking forward to better gaming pings and faster piracy.
All I can see from NBN is consumption, no productivity gains, as any decent sized business already has fast internet.
Stupid government, sold this to the stupid populace.
All I can say, as a small business owner, is that you mustn't know very many if you think all is hunky-dory with internet speeds in Australia.
And the statement that "any decent sized business already has fast internet" is clear evidence that you should get out more. Apart from the fact it isn't true, you should also look at the cost of getting "fast internet" when you want it. Given its pathetically slow upload speeds, ADSL2+ is completely useless for any digital media-based business, so that leaves cable or fibre. Cable is only available to about 20% of the population. To give you an example for fibre, the quote I received for a fibre connection for me was $19,500 for the connection, and $4,000 per month for a 100Mbps CIR. I'm about 2km from a telephone exchange in a outer suburban area of Sydney. Now I have no doubt that many medium to large businesses are paying that now. Imagine the savings if that business could get a free connection, and pay maybe $300 a month for a high-end NBN connection.
All that aside, given that over the last 15 years typical internet speeds in Australia have increased by about 10,000 times, how do you think those people happy with ADSL2+
now will feel about it in another
15 years? How do you think business will move to the cloud, when average upload speeds in Australia are only 1Mbps?
The only way to substantially improve internet speeds is to roll out new infrastructure to replace the copper, whether it be with fibre of HFC cable. And the cost of doing either is similar. Even a stop-gap like FTTN would cost a good $15-20bn, plus whatever we'd have to pay to Telstra. So if (as anyone looking objectively would agree) we will certainly need a faster network within the next 10-15 years, what is a better way of getting there? The private sector has demonstrated that it's not interested. They have done no HFC for a decade or more, no fibre, no FTTN, no VDSL2.....
----
You think the NBN could never pay for itself through productivity etc? Well, off the top of my head, we have a GDP of $1.2 Trillion.
Even taking your inflated NBN figure of $50bn (the capex is actually 36), and given a minimum life of 50 years, that amounts to 0.1% of GDP pa in present dollar terms.
You really don't think that a world-class broadband network could add $1bn (0.1%) pa to our economy across the country?
A
study into superfast broadband in Seattle found that a network in that city alone would result in economic benefits of US$1bn pa for the city.