Wednesday, April 8. 2009Krudd Try's A Mega Bluff To Save Face...John Linton ...for the failure of his first bluff to deliver on his sound bite election vote winner of an "NBN" ($A4.7 billion to 98% of the Australian population within 5 years becomes $A43 billion to 90% of the population in 8 years - after f***ing around for 18 months pretending they were almost ready to begin). Just remember I was the the person who "unkindly" said that the acronym "NBN" was Krudd-speak for "No Broadband Now". Krudd clearly is a devotee of the 19th century US political process of "when your first lie fails simply tell a bigger lie". Why do I say this? What would your estimate be of when Krudd and co commissioned this bit of fluff to be written (bearing in mind it was 'published co-incidentally with El Presidente's announcement that his BS about an 'NBN' tender had been found out to be a farce and had to be scrapped via his humiliating back down yesterday?). But not to worry the Australian electorate are so f***ing stupid they will fall for the new enormous bluff and there's only 18 months to the next election to maintain the bluff. While I have no real idea of how long it takes a technically illiterate bunch of public servants to select the appropriate 'consultants' to write the techo jargon and then hire another bunch of consultants to pretty up the presentation and then get the appropriate sign offs I'm guessing it was not in 2009. Which raises the question of how much of the NBN tenderer's time has been wasted going through the charade of making a bid under the original tender 'guidelines'? Like everything Krudd promises and then attempts to do, it's all smoke and mirrors using random quotes for support and glossing over any factual content. It follows precisely the methodology of every one of his other lies - no detail on time frame/no detail on costing - just wide blue sky generalisation. Anyone remember his first three 'promises'?: 1) The Ideas Summit (never heard from again) 2) The Kyoto Protocol (signed with immense self promotion and then abandoned without a second thought) 3) Saying "sorry" to some indeterminate group of people on behalf of another indeterminate group of people (street theatre with Krudd as the only participant and then 'back to business as usual) Froth and bubble in between self aggrandising overseas trips. Now, nine months after the NBN was meant to be already underway we have the squirming worm trying to make an abject back down look like some sort of personal triumph - totally sickening. ...and I actually agree that the structural separation of Telstra is one of the only solutions for Australian communications and that if money is going to be p***ed away by this jerk then it would be better spent on building infrastructure that employs Australians rather than being stuck in to poker machines and wasted by buying cheap imported liquor in bottle shops or making bikie gangs wealthier. But 'winging' completely un-costed (in any senses of those words) numbers like $A43 billion and "27,000 new jobs" is just charlatanism at its most barefaced. Krudd's increasing belief that he can get away with saying anything: "The "hand out of over $A10 billion to low income Australians will create 75,000 new jobs" springs to mind - is a terrible indictment of the Australian electorate's stupidity coupled with a mind blowing level of credulity. How does spending $A10 billion to create 75,000 jobs compare with spending $A43 billion to create 27,000 jobs? Krudd's ability to believe that he can say whatever he likes seems to have allowed him to 'depreciate' what the tax payer dollar now buys in terms of "new jobs" by an order of magnitude in one short sentence. No-one, and I mean no-one, could believe that either of Krudd's head line numbers in his back down speech yesterday could even reflect a scintilla of actual hard number crunching - even if they were taken from the bids of those dummies that have p***ed away their time and money helping "the expert panel" understand the magnitude of the task. So what to make of it all? Nothing has changed - Krudd's Labor party is clinging grimly to their tactics to obtain a second term in "power" by spending two generations of Australian's future income and lying outrageously about the time frames so that they can get close to the 'wire' before it becomes obvious to the Labor electorate that they have been conned. This will, partly, be at the cost of a total freeze on any innovation or investment in any sort of communications infrastructure by anyone in Australia except Telstra. (strange about that). No 'spade' will hit the ground in mainland Australia before pretty close to the next election, if it does at all, and the lawyers will get even richer with the various challenges that Telstra will make (though there is a more than reasonable conspiracy theory that says that Telstra 'did a deal' to get the NBN canned and in exchange for an agreed cash payment and ownership guarantees in the new "authority" it would submit a non-conforming bid to get the whole process abandoned meanwhile announcing the way forward by a mix of terrestrial and wireless technologies). In the mean time Tasmania will get some funding so that it can appear a start has been made and to sow up the 5 federal Tasmanian electorates at the next election which is sort of fine because Tasmania has been shafted by Telstra for 18 years and if Krudd can throw away billions on one small selection of Australians he may as well shovel some money to another selected group. (though, note the overt political cynicism in shoveling money at Tasmania where there are five federal electorates all of which have a propensity to 'swing' in federal elections whereas, a presumably similar bid for the ACT, which has an equal number of people and always votes Labor in a federal election didn't get the go ahead). Pig in a cask time starts before the beginning? In summary: Krudd's 'NBN' bluff was called and he had to back down in the most humiliating way possible.....make NO mistake...he had to admit that everything he promised was a hopeless lie and that everything that had been said by him and his cat's paw, Stupid Stephen, was pure BS from the first utterance - there is no other way of looking at it. Krudd lacked any form of 'gracefulness or self accountability' in his back down acknowledgment and simply substituted a much bigger bluff with time frames that mean he can get to the next election without having an even greater humiliation - on this topic at least. ...but then I may be completely wrong in my interpretation of the FACTs that have attended the last 18 months (including yesterday's) of this travesty of a government. PS: Although my lightening fast mind sees these things more quickly than financial journalists - eventually they reach the same conclusions: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25317958-14743,00.html Just what this country needs - another government telecommunications monopoly. Where did I put my retirement home application form? PS: Krudd makes Whitlam look like a fiscal conservative.....and look where that moron ended us up. Trackbacks
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Hi John,
The link does not work for me... could you check it please? Harry. Comment (1)
I've changed the link - you now need to select which format you want to download.
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Oh how right you are JL... stall tactics indeed, I just love how none of the legal challenges have been looked at, but yet "Tasmania will be soon". It doesn't seem to serve the Governments interests to create a competitor for a company they own a majority in... slaps head - why not work with the existing company, Telstra? ALP was against selling it off right? So regulate it to hell.
The coverage gap of 20% (NBN vs OPEL) seems to be worth many billions of dollars... is it really worth it, given the current global financial situation? For a long time I've been saying - bring back OPEL Comment (1)
You can pay back a hell of a lot of favours with that kind of money to slosh around. It makes me ill to think of the size of the trough and the number of snouts that will be already salivating to get at it.
And what will everyone do with all that bandwidth? Two good things that I can see: - the government is going to make damn sure no Australian child dies in Halo due to laggy internet. - Everyone will have enough bandwidth to download any pirated tv show or movie they want Comment (1)
Exactly! What a waste of money! I'm guessing a large proportion of the Fibre connections (about 80%) will be to homes. How's that helping the economy?
- 100MB is overkill for residential. What content is left beyond Video and Audio which needs 100MBs? And even still, people are prepared to wait 30mins for a legit movie download. It's the price/per GB which needs to catch up to the rest of the world. - They say this system will help Hospitals to stream video of remote patients? They're already doing this! Hospitals already have fast networks! And improve education? I'm sorry but spending the money directly on the education system is better than given every kid their own laptop and a ridiculously fast internet connection - Great, so now I have a 100mb fibre connection. Now i'll go outside... oh no! My cable snapped! (eg. It should be wireless - cheaper and mobile) - Imagine if Kevin was truly committed to going green.... $43b would be great for multi-TW solar thermal power generation. And how about telling our automotive industry to be building 100% electric cars by 2020? We would come out of the recession, soaring above other nations, without a reliance on oil! (BTW, base load is nuclear) Comments (2)
#1 - 100mb is overkill TODAY. Once upon a time 512 was overkill, now its not fast enough for many. Price/GB has to play catch up yeah, but that is probably going to be labours NEXT BB promise
#2 - Such connections can help education. Goto your local library and see how fast it is. Slooooowwwww.... most schools are the same. It will also allow country schools, imo, to get access to more through video conferencing (just an idea) #3 - Get a wireless router...? Hotspots will probably end up being more prevelant under this than it is currently. #4 - Agree completely. One thing I think that not everyone is taking into account is the extra online businesses that could actually flourish under a new network. Download services, IPTV, video/voice (in HD). These mean more tax $$ if Australian companies jump in before places like netflix start trying to muscle in on the $$. Comment (1)
It sounds like the communications minister heard of FTTH and thought, wow that'd be cool - how incompitent.
#1 Yes i'm sure they'll fill the bandwidth vacuum with content, but in 8 years they'll have technology which will achieve the bandwidth, namely wireless. #2 Yes, but why spend billions covering the commercial, domestic and governement premises, when only schools need an internet upgrade? #3 So we spend billions on the fibre infrastructure only to have every house hold buy a wireless router to acheive mobile internet? I was eluding to have them put the money directly into wireless solutions. Telstras Next G is already 21Mb! In 8 years the 100MB fibre will already be obsolete. Although I have to say that Fibre would have better privacy and can't be jammed, plus each 100mb link would most likely be upgradable beyond 100mb, but then again so is wireless. #5 Why do we have to be first movers to have 100MBs FTTH? They said Japan is doing it, but look at their financial situation, plus they have a denser population which makes it more viable (One Fibre to a residential high rise in Japan, is paid by hundreds of residents) #6 I remember hearing about the merits of high altitude airships, which can blanket a city with coverage. No ugly towers, etc... #7 It seems the governement is simply trying to break the telstra monopoly. Why don't they just pass create policies to do so, instead of using $$$xBillions. I'd rather have a telstra monopoly than more national debt for a scheme which will only probably end up in another monopoly when it's sold off - telecommunications backbone should remain gov owned. #8 There is also the problem of the multiple overlayed networks. 1. Many mobile networks (Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, WiMAX, ), 2. Many Wired Networks (Copper, Cable, Fibre?). During the good economic times this was easy to achieve. In the average economy this is counter productive - Where's the gov. regulation? #9 And where is all the fibre and networking equipment coming from? I bet none of it will be made in Australia! For laying the cable, they'll probably even use a company with international stakeholders. #10 My solution: - A comprehensive government wholesale backbone (Maybe legislate to buy existing networks off existing firms? Doesn't seem likely) - Upgrade international links (Multi-spectrum fibre?) - Last mile - Wireless, DSL Comments (2)
Lateline was interesting last night. The Opposition spokeperson (Minchin) called the "new company" a telephone company. He seemed well out of touch. I doubt he knows much about the internet either.
My humble opinion is that if we need this infrastructure because it will facilitate commerce, education and general communication for the next 20 years, then we should invest in it. We probably should have when times were good, but we didn't. I don't know if this is the best model to use "ie new company" but all govts waste money. I would also like to see action and deliverables amongst the waste. I hope that this govt can deliver and not just talk. Comment (1)
But the new network will do voice, video (IPTV), broadband etc right? This isn't going to be purely broadband and you still use Telstra PSTN for voice?
This whole plan feels similar to US based carriers Verizon FiOS service which is a fiber to the home style service in selected areas of the United States which they use to provide Broadband, phone/voice and cable tv. Will the new network support tipple play? If so how will ISPs sell pay TV services when Foxtel has the rights to everything and Telstra won't let Foxtel out of its sights? (Yes I know Optus/Austar resells Foxtel). Comments (2)
Just found the following paper written in Dec 2008 on the Digital Education Revolution referencing the NBN using Wireless & Satellite
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/DigitalEducationRevolution/FibreConnection/Documents/Fibre%20Connections%20to%20Schools%20Investment%20Principles%20(2).pdf Seem you are right in your estimation of the time taken to produce the brochure you refer to Comment (1)
I wonder if the Govt will use "Green" companies in the build out process? I wonder if this new NBN company will offset its carbon emissions to fall in line with government policy? If so how much extra will be tacked on for each wholesale port? Do we all really think we'll continue to get low usage broadband services for under $50 a month? The Labor party has screwed you all
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IMHO we would be better off spending that sort of money in putting a water pipe between FNQ & SEQ & feeding the Murray Darling rivers, 1 we would give the guys from Rio Tinto jobs that they lost yesterday & 2 it could open up arid land area's along the way. (Bradford Scheme?) What is being proposed is duplicating what basically is already there (cable tv in most residential areas of our built up cities) Look at the demographics & see where 90% of the population lives it does not extend past the existing infrastructure in place! Also if we have 100mb feeds will the the download caps go up exponentially or will we use our monthly downloads with 15 mins?
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I agree with you completely - but that soesn't address the fact that Krudd's key election promise has been shown up to be complete BS.
By the way - there is exactly NO chance of this latest bluff turning in to reality. It was just an attempt to get Krudd off the hook. Comments (3)
If we assume for the moment that the NBN does get built then contrary to what has been said in the media, in my view, Telstra must think all their Christmas’ have come at once. They can continue to build out and upgrade their wireless product, and they’ll no doubt do more and more exchange upgrades like that in Canberra recently and lock out DSL wholesalers (yes, the claim was it was legit, but). I just can’t see Mum and Dad punter prepared to pay for a NBN connection. So we will be left with three choices; legacy ADSL1 with a dwindling supply of providers, ADSL2 from Telstra (doing whatever they can get away with to obtain a monopoly) and the NBN. So people will continue to be screwed by Telstra if they want ADSL2 and will be really screwed if they want a connection to the NBN. And Telstra will make a bit on the side with portions of the NBN, like lease of trenches etc etc etc.
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