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Comment by aplummer | Hacker News Reader

This is an extremely biased and misleading take on the situation.

Look at premises passed when the LNP came into power.

https://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco2/documents/nbn-ro...

Total activated in mid 2014, ~250k. That is completely nuts, you make it sound like this was a steady ship the LNP tipped over.

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They did have to setup the whole company, negotiate with Telsta, run the backbone's and set everything else up.

They were behind on connections its true, but that was largely due to Telstra having to remediate the ducts filled with asbestos which halted large portions of the rollout. Had they continued I expect that the ramp up would have been similar to New Zealand.

What is biased is citing premises passed at an really phase in a project which deliberately planned to roll out difficult sites first. Of course there were not many premises passed, that is meaningless without context.

It wasn't though. The rollout follows political seats exactly to the street. In Brisbane this means that it followed the border of marginal ALP seats that cross the river and back again instead of doing adjacent houses.

It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.

I don't even vote LNP, but you have to wonder about the efficiency of a rollout where you get faster internet driving an hour out of Melbourne than Fitzroy or a lot of the CBD. For a project originally estimated at 4.7 then 15 then 42 billion, dense paying customers early should probably have been prioritised.

If your concern is just with government expenditures, sure, but you can also make the argument that prioritising rural areas could give them a head start on the growth of digital services. Taking Australia from being a market where cities have ~okay~ internet and rural areas have poor internet to one where at first everyone has okay to great connectivity and later everyone has great connectivity has its merits.

> where you get faster internet driving an hour out of Melbourne than Fitzroy or a lot of the CBD

Melbourne already had awesome internet, the need was much less there. You can disagree with the decision to rollout to internet-disadvantaged areas if you want, but don't pretend that the conscious decision to do so was bad management when it was actually an attempt at equity (ie: addressing the most needy customers first).

The rollout didn't follow political seats. Numbers showed initial rollouts followed 67 labor, 61 coalition, 6 others. Anything more recent than that is really only attributable to the new NBN's MTM direction.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-29/government-announces-n...

> It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.

It's a once-in-100 years project to create infrastructure with a lifetime of the same order. It involved replacing nearly 100% of the country's telecommunications infrastructure. 5 years is not particularly long in that context, and trashing it because you can't wait 7 years or even 10 years instead of 5 in exchange for a vastly inferior outcome is just utter stupidity.

So yes, measuring rollout numbers 5 years in is meaningless.

I disagree that 5 years is a short period of time from 2009 to 2014 in the context of their own estimates saying completion in 2020.

It was an unsteady ship that could be righted with some well-known and publicised fixes. Instead they filled it with more water and blamed everybody but themselves.

What an incredibly disingenuous use of those figures.

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