John Linton
We got back to Sydney yesterday evening after an uneventful flight though Annette picked up some sort of virulent bug and a very high fever so her flight was very uneventful as she slept all of the way. She is still very ill today so let's hope it proves to be a transient bug and not some insidious tropical disease. One of the penalties of frequent, but short, visits to countries where health hazards are very different to those we encounter in Australia.
I read Friday's AFR on the flight home and on page 63 there was an opinion piece written by Simon Molloy of Systems Knowledge Concepts ( I have never heard of the man nor the company so I have no idea of his credentials) head lined:
"Upwardly mobile: more bad news for the NBN"
As I started reading the article I found myself in total agreement with what was being said and then it struck me - the article was almost a direct copy of a blog I wrote a few weeks ago right down to the sources I had so meticulously cited and the numbers I had used to illustrate the point and even came to the same conclusions as to how the NBN would most likely become a Telstra dominated re-monopolisation of the wire line communications in Australia while wireless had already made the 'NBN2' completely unnecessary. As I doubt that anyone would plagiarise anything I have written the most obvious scenario is that more and more people are beginning to see the 'NBN2' for what it is (Krudd's political stunt to cover up his lies and promises made to win the last election) and more people are beginning to see the obvious dangers of Krudd's Kraziness in meddling in issues of great importance about which he and Stupid Stephen know Sweet Fanny Adams.
Irrespective of what any vested interest based opinions come from the mouths of the nay sayers the figures remain compelling evidence that Australia has no need of an 'NBN2' any more than it has a need for 12 submarines or 48 billion dollar a piece military aircraft. These are student union idiocy type decisions reached late at night over too many funny cigarettes and cheap flagon wine - "wouldn't it be great" type immature idiocy but in Krudd's case capable of de-railing Australia's communications infrastructure for decades. It won't happen because the numbers say it can't happen and while Krudd may get away with the next election and therefore blindly persist in this 'NBN2' stupidity for another 4 years all that will happen is that more billions of tax payer's dollars will be frittered away, less investment will be made in fibre infrastructure than otherwise would have been and country and rural Australia will continue to buy wireless broadband to meet their data and voice call needs.
Whether or not Telstra will continue to develop its fibre network which it appears to be doing remains to be seen. However there is a pretty compelling business case (in every country in the world) for fibre to be used in densely populated areas and for wireless to be used in less densely populated areas. Telstra was clearly following this path before the election and has pretty much continued to follow it post Krudd's "Ascendancy" while arguing that the only sensible way forward is for the government to give it the money to extend its capital city based fibre to regional Australia while it provided high speed wireless services to rural Australia.......and that makes perfect sense (except the bit about the government funding Teltra's fibre monopoly.
In the mean time the value of the current Telstra PSTN infrastructure and its revenue base continues to fall and fall more quickly as each month passes. That makes the 'government/Telstra' negotiations ever more pointless as without transferring Telstra's monopoly to the NBN monopoly none of the figures work at all (not that they ever did). The reality is that an increasing number of Australians (including "Australian working families") are dumping fixed line communications 'forever' as they use their mobile telephones and mobile data (increasingly) to ditch both the excessive costs of wire line services and the inconvenience of 'fixed point communications' in an ever more mobile Australian life and work style.
Perhaps, as Molloy suggested in his article, it's time for Krudd "to announce to the nation that technology has moved on since his election promises and that Australian consumers are voting for mobile".
....and pigs may fly.