John Linton ....when governemnt incompetence is involved.
While it doesn't seem possible, it's getting close to a year since we first heard of Crazy Kevin's 'sound bite policy' of "no Australian shall live in broadband poverty by the end of 2009". Of course when I had then come to grips with the concept that such an innate total fool would become the head of a government that would fool around with the idea of trying to make that insane concept become a reality we made the only sensible decision possible and put any investment in infrastructure on hold until either the idiots finally forgot about the whole stupidity or they found a way of diluting the thing down to some half baked concept that wouldn't have any bearing on reality.
While neither of those things has yet happened it is becoming clearer that the whole NBN fairy story for the clinically insane will turn out to be just that - a slowly fading stupidity that the Coalition will beat CK to death with come the next election. So it has become time to re-look at the options for infrastructure investment so that no more time will be wasted if one of the two obvious conclusions to CK's cynical election lying does in fact become reality.
Over the past few days we have reinitiated contacts with the three companies who had previously provided us with quotes for infrastructure builds in around 100 exchanges to get new figures and to understand what new technologies are now becoming available (I know there are a whole lot of people who still can't get ADSL2 now but that may turn out to be a blessing in the future). Since my trip to Europe (where it became clear that almost every EU telco was in the process of rolling out 40 gbps national backbones) it is obvious that an ADSL2 implementation would have been the wrong decision to have made early this year irrespective of the reality or otherwise of the ludicrous 12 mbps NBN fiasco postulated by CK, ESS and the rest of the doctrinaire dinosaurs, hacks and just plain mad men and women currently in the ACT playng 'government for the very young'.
Deploying even a small network such as the one that Exetel could contemplate using 1 gbps backhauls would have been a major error of judgement and even 10 gbps (which we can't afford now in any event) would be pointless as even one of the more conservative EU carriers, Italy's, is already trialling 40 - 150 mbps services for business users in two major cities (Milan and Turin) at prices around the current 10mbps services in that country. A 1 gbps backhaul would not be useful in high speed service solutions and neither would a 10 gbps.
If it turns out to be economically feasible (and it seems 40 gbps backbone equipment has already fallen to the price of 10 gbps equipment last year and is predicated to continue to fall as the manufacturer's build volumes continue to steeply climb) then there are now some interesting developments to be considered. However CK's NBN fiasco turns out it will have had one, possible, benefit in that each of the three companies we have contact with have all now looked at providing significantly faster back haul solutions in Australia and therefore the 'local knowledge' is significantly greater than it was a year ago.
Perhaps it will all remain a pie in the sky bit of wishful thinking but we will at least go to the prliminary stage of looking at providing true high speed solutions for large and large/medium business users in Sydney and Melbourne and perhaps other places with the 'spin off' ability to provide other services to residential users should some of the preliminary discussions actually produce financially viable implementations.
Of course it may all prove another waste of valuable time (at least for the suppliers we are asking for pricing) and CK and the rest of the loonies will actually insist on proceeding with their doomed NBN for some considerable time thus consigning any investment in real network services (by anyone) in to permanent suspension - at some stage of their evolution it may be possible for Yorkshire Blacks to develop flight capabilities?