I’ve been a little lax in properly reading my RSS feeds of late. But this article on Australia being 11th in broadband penetration caught my eye before I used the magic mark all as read.

While I am entirely hesitant to truly believe what is said in this article: 1) because it seems deliberately vague; and 2) There are no references nor can I find another correlating story. If it is true then my initial response must be: being 11th doesn’t mean it’s good enough. But then one should look a little deeper at the top 10 results: South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are very different, demographically and geographically, from Australia you’re really comparing apples and oranges which, we all know, just doesn’t work.

Compare two metro areas: Sydney and Seoul. I know that Sydney will have worse services at higher prices. Which obliterates the “is good enough” argument. I feel that access should be equivelent – it’s not like the technology doesn’t exist. And then to bring it home: Sydney vs Cobar; no points for guessing the outcome there.

All this got me thinking though: I just managed to crack the 3 digit friends size on Facebook (shameless linking). If all we’re generally using our broadband for is socialising: do we need 100Mbps or FTTH? No I don’t think so. And believe me I like my internet(s) to be fast.

That’s apathy though.

To Senator Minchin: it’s not a competition, it’s about having good service for reasonable price, and those stats to be globally equivelent. Let’s pick the technology we should have in place nation wide and implement it.

The government announced NBN2 and the globe kept spinning; nothing new to see here. However we (as in Australia) got a regulatory review and that was probably a good outcome. As I’ve been half following the NBN in the news I’m finding some of the review findings/submissions interesting. However there are some things that just make me want to go into cryogenic stasis – I might see something change that way.

To think that this is even a source of contention is rediculous. The practical requirement, in my opinion, of getting HIGH speed internet(s) is Fiber to the x, FTTN being the most likely for a first build out, which means optical fiber needs to be run to every pit of every exchange. (NB. I refuse to use the word broadband as it is really a description of relative technologies; not a service).

The risks of having hanging cables are many. Downtime from damage is a biggie. But that is entirely irrelevent. Pits can flood shorting out the copper circuits; someone can dig before dialing; etc… and security wise: it’s not like the current copper network is at all protected from someone who knows how to patch a copper pair – having said that optical fiber splicing is arguably harder so that’s a plus for “back to the exchange”.

None of those risks qualify my statement of rediculous though.

We have perfectly functional cabling conduit and other accesses for rolling out FTTN. The position should be they will be used. To all the people involved: Get over the bureaucracy and get something done for once. Conroy/DBCDE: buy back the wholesale stuff from Telstra – that’s the governments penalty for not seperating during the privatisation; Telstra shareholders: set a price for the buy out – consider it a forced buy out or unfriendly takeover if you will but take a spoon of toughen up: other countries privatisation arrangements seperated wholesale and retail from the outset; Telstra was a bubble that is now going to either burst or be popped; and that writing was on the wall from day one.

In summary: there shouldn’t be an option. It’s rediculous.