John Linton ….and in the far North Of the Scottish Highlands back roads each corner is only a hundred or so metres away which makes for quite a lot of beautiful views on a 100 mile drive.
We drove to Durness today through what was promised to us as the most beautiful mountain, island and water scenery in the world. I’m not competent to judge it on that basis but it is the most beautiful I have ever seen. I threw a ‘symbolic’ pebble in to the North Sea at one of the most Northerly points in the UK before turning the car round and repeating the experience on a, largely, different route back to the hotel via the Summer Isles Smoke House where we had bought the best smoked salmon we had ever tasted almost thirty years ago.
Sadly, as with the hotel on the Lochinver trawler wharf we had stayed at on our first visit to this part of the world so many years ago, it had changed – hardly surprising. No venison sausage or wild boar pies and definitely no wild smoked salmon. The original creator of the smoker still owned it but it had moved to ‘factory’ style premises (from its run down shed behind the local pub) and only smoked farmed local salmon and a bit of trout and haddock. We bought some anyway and then drove back to the hotel via the extremely narrow, heavily wooded on either side, twisty and turny, one lane road we remembered from our previous visit (yes, it’s that memorable).
We got back to the hotel and a couple of Balvennie’s for me and strong black coffee my traveling companion restored our ability to deal with life and business…..sigh….nothing like a week’s holiday to make Australia and Exetel seem quite remote.
I read the various mainstream Australian press accounts of where the current the labor Government, Telstra, Optus and the NBN stand and, as can be expected from the Australian, or any other country’s, reporters very little understanding of the issues of such a technically difficult to understand concept is being demonstrated.
So, what I get from what I read can be summarized as:
1) It’s beginning to dawn on CK a ESS that this project is REALLY COMPLICATED and they don’t understand ANYTHING involved in it. (fair enough – no-one outside Telstra and Optus would have ANY idea of what would be involved in actually building such a network and neither of them have previously done it because the actual concept is far too difficult).
2) CK via ESS is now more obviously playing down the scope of the original ‘sound bite policy’ and is overtly talking about ‘lowered expectations’ and a ‘significantly longer roll out’.
3) In fact all thoughts of delivering anything via this tender before mid 2010 is now being more clearly put in to words by ESS and Labor generally.
The facts remain as I originally (and some less than kind people might suggest precipitately) proclaimed – it will never happen unless:
a) Telstra does it on its own terms
b) Labor saves face by promising rigorous validation of the prices Telstra charges for the service
c) Nobody ever uses the NBN because it’s too expensive and HSPA and ADSL2 deliver better services at much lower costs.
I’m probably wrong on every count - quite frankly I no longer care what happens as it will not happen in any meaningful time frame and I have my part to play in delivering real services in real time frames at really affordable prices – and that takes all the time that any small company like Exetel has available to it.
So - NBN – a political nonsense that will continue to waste time and money of any parties foolish to involve themselves in any part of the ‘tender’ process and will simply make communications in Australia more expensive that they are today.
“Thank you waiter – I think I will have another now you press me.”