The Daily Telegraph publishing "inaccurate and misleading" articles about the NBN? Surely not.

The Australian Press Council has come down on the Daily Telegraph for publishing three blatant NBN beat-up articles in June and July. It has reminded it that "Publications should take reasonable steps to ensure reports are accurate, fair and balanced. They should not deliberately mislead or misinform readers either by omission or commission".

http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2011/12/23/3397389.htm

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/285272,press-council-finds-news-limited-misled-ove...

NBNMyths wrote on Dec 24^th, 2011 at 10:31am:


There are those on here that have often referred to this publications bias and inaccuracies and been howled down.

Must remember to come back to this thread after Chrissy.

Thanx, NBNMyths.

Andrei.Hicks wrote on Dec 24^th, 2011 at 10:18pm:


Why would you describe it as a white elephant? It's neither useless, nor unpopular. It will finally deliver decent communications infrastructure to areas outside the CBDs.

One of the key objectives of the NBN is to provide a service to areas where the private sector wouldn't do it. To provide a ubiquitous broadband for all Australians.

Why do it? Seriously? You don't think decent broadband is a basic utility service that all Australians should have access to these days? What about in another 10 years?

How about roads? Telephones? Heath care? Education? Water? Electricity? Postal services? All of those things are delivered by Government through the same cross-subsidisation model that the NBN will be using. Because providing your citizens with these services is a part of living in a 1st World society.

Unlike your company, the NBN isn't designed to make a profit. It is designed to provide ubiquitous broadband and merely break even. If the sole criteria for Governments was to make a profit, then the copper phone network would never have been rolled out beyond the city limits. Neither would the electricity grid. The cost to post a letter would not be 60c nationwide. We never would have built the Snowy Scheme. Medicare would be a pipe dream.

As for the "Telegraph's view".... It's not their job to have a view, it's their job to report the news. Accurately. They failed.

longweekend58 wrote on Dec 25^th, 2011 at 4:54pm:


Actually, it's pretty much the opposite. New greenfield estates aside, the best broadband in Australia (and the only part that is really the equiv of most developed countries) is the areas covered by HFC cable networks. Telstra's covers about 25% of the population, while Optus' covers about 15%. Neither network has been expanded for about a decade.

Then there is the pricing. Less than 9% of Telstra exchanges have competitive ADSL2+, which means most areas must pay the exhorbitant prices of Telstra retail or wholesale ADSL2+. That means people like me, an hour from Sydney, pay almost double the price someone 20 minutes away pays for exactly the same service. The NBN is not just about speed, but also ubiquity of service and pricing.

As for whether it's "good enough".... Australia sits close to the bottom of the OECD list for both average broadband speeds and fibre penetration. We are actually outranked by many undeveloped countries, and last I looked were about 60th in the World. Average speeds are only about 8-9Mbps here. While such speeds may be adequate for many people now, what about in 10 years? A decade ago average speeds were around 128kbps (and we thought that was fast), so they have now increased by a factor of about 80. Do you expect that we won't need or expect a similar increase over the next 10 years, or do you think the demand for bandwidth will suddenly come to a grinding halt? Because the only way speeds can be increased now is:
a) Roll out fibre
b) Roll out HFC
c) Roll out FTTN

...and all of those options take a long time to design and build. FTTN is the fastest, but that would still take 5 years and be reasonably quickly obsolete. There's no point starting HFC now because it would cost as much as FTTP. So that leaves fibre. Build it once. Build it right.

Distance is the issue, and there is no DSL technology that can overcome our big distances. So if Govt don't do it who will? And (given the evidence of outrageous private sector FTTP pricing) how much will we pay for it?

The incredible short-sightedness of conservatives never ceases to amaze me, not to mention the dogmatic attachment to "free market" ideology even in the face of irrefutable evidence that theory doesn't always work in practise.

Lobo wrote on Dec 26^th, 2011 at 12:27pm:

Pause button politics: this explains the anthrax attacks on America!!

COMBINATIONS COME FROM A SUPERIOR POSTION,... BUT WHAT SUPERIORITY, I REPEAT, WHAT SUPERIORITY DO NUCLEAR WEAPONS OFFER?

People have to wake up: greedy corporations with limited liability do not an impervious-to-damage-society make!!!

 

WEAKNESS ABOUNDS IN A GREEDY SOCIETY AS GREEDS LEGACY IS TUNNEL VISION!

YEH, LET'S ALL BELIEVE IN THE VALUE OF TRICKLE-DOWN THEORY COUNTER TO MOSTS DIRECT EXPERIENCES!!!

 

 

NBNMyths wrote on Dec 25^th, 2011 at 8:39pm:





 

Andrei.Hicks wrote on Dec 24^th, 2011 at 10:18pm:

longweekend58 wrote on Dec 25^th, 2011 at 4:54pm: