Why Murdoch's media is gunning for your NBN (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Why Murdoch's media is gunning for your NBN (2013)

nofibs.com.au

41 pointsdools20 comments

Interesting but it doesn’t get past the a priori objection to the NBN having been adopted without any economic or commercial assessment to justify it as a political fix when the election promise to provide better broadband at one tenth the cost of the NBN was shown to be hopeless and an embarrassing shambles. And it doesn’t demonstrate that the a priori probability that a proven entrepreneur in the field of Internet based services would be able to do the essential job more cost effectively.

I agree, there are many absurd components of the NBN, the most obvious being the idea that the government should spend $2 billion to launch two satellites into orbit just to provide internet to the 400,000 most rural customers who can't get cellular wireless (yet).

It's not so ridiculous if you consider the fact that, with decent internet, that 400,000 might grow considerably in number, reducing housing pressure in the major urban centres and allowing Australia to grow without having to slather on MOAR INFRASTRUCTURE to Sydney and Melbourne's already groaning transport systems.

The same reason data casting and any kind of innovation in the digital TV rollout was killed off in 2000. Don't upset the status quo.

That was from Richard Alston back then, again the Liberal party.

Richard alston the worlds biggest luddite

NBN? Anyone know what that is?

Australia's National Broadband Network. The gist of the article seems to be that Murdoch wants to kill off fibre in Australia because it's a threat to traditional TV.

Not traditional TV, just Foxtel which is the biggest pay TV provider in Australia. Pay TV has much lower penetration in Australia than the US or UK, but if we had universal fibre access to every home, Foxtel would die pretty quickly. Foxtel is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and so is the Daily Telegraph which runs ridiculously overt front page articles against the Labor government and in favour of the Liberal government (for example, during the lead up to the last election the Tele had a cover that read, in very big letters "KICK THIS MOB OUT" referring to the encumbent government).

Not "wants to". Did.

What the Coalition did with the NBN is a national disgrace.

let's not even speak of the 2014 budget.

I just learned of it in a comment on the discussion of Cringely's article on peering - more context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7774936

NBN(fiber to the premise) is already killed off. The new government is adopting Fiber to the node for future installations.

The former government (centre-right Labor party) promised FTTH or FTTP (Fibre To The Home/Premises) but that was scrapped when the slightly-less-centre-and-more-far-right Liberal party got in and proposed FTTN (Fibre To The Node). The "Node" is a box at the end of every street, from which the existing (and rotting) copper network would theoretically connect to each home. Needless to say the idea is profoundly stupid.

FTTH is still available if you want to pay thousands of dollars for your connection, of course. We call this FTTR: Fibre To The Rich.

Not even purely fiber to the node any more, they are going with a "multi-technology mix"[1]

So by the end of 2020, 98% to 100% of the population would have at least 25Mbps[2]. Which is maybe twice as fast as what we have now on average (as a guess).

It is also way behind schedule and over budget[3], when being quicker and cheaper were its main selling points against the FTTP solution proposed by the Labor government.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/10/malcolm-turnbul...

[2]http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/17/nbn-chairm...

[3]http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/12/coalitions...

To be fair, the company executing on Labour's vision - NBNCo - was also going much slower than originally projected too.

Yeah but by the time it finished, it would be far from being obsolete ;)

And not need significant repairs

As a follow up, this is also interesting: http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-displa...

Anyone else have trouble reading the upside down text?

Pipe down or we'll give you the boot!

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