Command and Control?
If only Australia had a publicly owned communication structure then the Government could mandate what was built...
Turnbull says big telcos should subsidise bush comms
It looks like the federal government is getting its feet in a tangle, trying to reconcile the public good of the National Broadband Network with free-market doctrine. Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has floated his ideas of how to create a transparent mechanism to subsidise rural telecommunications, and it seems to …
-
-
Friday 23rd January 2015 05:10 GMT Fluffy Bunny
Re: Command and Control?
"If only Australia had a publicly owned communication structure" - we did, it was called Telecom Australia and it was such an abomination. But you couldn't bypass it because any communications that crossed a road had to be provided by Telecom.
It was an apalling mess that was only abolished at great cost. And don't say the Gov't can mandate what it does - Telecom responded to nobody's needs. For a long time, it wasn't even legal to plug in a modem.
-
-
Thursday 22nd January 2015 00:35 GMT aberglas
Tax and subsidize
Given the idiot decision to sell Telstra, then a tax and subsidize might be appropriate. Much better than just "encouraging" and "hoping". Or even allow consumers to pay for it.
Personally, I just want broadband. I do not care how fast, or who pays, or how much it will cost me (within reason). But dial up lines are not acceptable in the 2010s.
Incidentally, Telstra's market cap was only about $30bn a couple of years ago. Labor would have done well to simply buy it back, and then sell of the mobile and retail. Cheaper than the NBN deal and no need to argue with anybody. (Liberals could not do that ideologically.)
-
-
Thursday 22nd January 2015 22:55 GMT Michael Xion
Oddly enough, the NBN is the cause of your problem
bear with me, this is a bit long...
I live in a rural area and about 10 years ago all we could get was 56k dialup. The government of the day introduced a program to provide fixed wireless in rural areas to make up for the deficiency of the network. We got an antenna on the roof and moved up to a 512k download speed. Unfortunately, the system was line of sight and trees grew in the way of the signal path, so it stopped working after a couple of years. In the meantime, Telstra upgraded the exchange to allow ADSL2+. Meaning I could then get 9mbps downlink (which is what I have to this day).
Back then, Telstra would upgrade exchanges on a rolling plan to ensure the service provided grew with the community. Once the NBN was mooted, this pretty much stopped. Nether Telstra, nor anyone else, was much concerned with upgrading the network when It might all get replaced or commandeered by the govt.
The upshot of this is that even though I live in a rural area, my internet speeds are better than many people I know who live in inner Brisbane (if they can even get ADSL) due to the poor state of the infrastructure and lack of upgrades over the last few years.
I should also point out that I live more than 3km from our exchange, so distance isn't the limiting factor. The limiting factor is the fucking government (of both political persuasions) stuffing around with the NBN rollout to the extent that if you don't have NBN, you're basically screwed.
tl;dr
NBN rollout has basically stopped any ADSL upgrades and everything is now getting congested.
My guess is that you are suffering from something akin to that, where your local exchange is at capacity and no more capacity will be added because of the NBN.
-
Wednesday 18th February 2015 10:03 GMT Giraffe67
My god I hope that's sarcasm....
I live near Bendigo (11km's from a city of 110,000) and the only option is to..... Go somewhere else!
Really crappy satellite that is unreliable and slow as s..t.
Or wireless where your only choice is Bigpond (no optus or other service here) and expect it to drop out unless you have the high gain antenna's.
And Bigpond want to send you a 4G modem.... ROFL, what for?
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
Biting the hand that feeds IT
